In the Current Where Drowning Is Beautiful

"This remarkable book undertakes a kind of geological exploration of the hidden-in-plain-sight strata making up the world around us and our lives within it: raspberries against graves against glaciers; disappeared women alongside disappearing rivers; mythic transformations next to anonymous martyrdoms. Connecting it all are stories—the questions they ask and answer, what they reveal or obscure—and water—as source of life and death, body of history and place where history's bodies are buried, manifestation of the cross-currents that swirl through and around us, bellwether of what's to come. Chabitnoy invites us into a dazzling, urgent mode of inquiry in which poems—keen and liminal, epic and intimate, fierce and tender—are the conscious element depositing us wide-awake on the shore of the precarious present we inherit and inhabit where, increasingly, 'the high ground isn't.'"—Lisa Olstein, author of Late Empire

"In the Current Where Drowning is Beautiful will sweep you up and subdue you. Chabitnoy powerfully and lyrically addresses the crisis of violence against Indigenous women, giving voice to those who have been silenced. This is a timeless and important work."—Rena Priest, Washington State Poet Laureate, 2021-2023