The poems in Spindrift blur the already fragmented lines of gender, offering us mermaids with beards, hairy nipples, and a thirst for damaged remains. Through Wiseman’s formal restraint and inventive definitions, we are invited into the deep sea of the unknown, and we find out the unknown knows us—knows our wars, our corporations, the crumbling frame of our environment, the very bodies we imagine ourselves to be. We learn, in Wiseman’s fantastical and deeply political collection, that the mermaids are watching us, and they worry about the state of our terrible, beautiful world. In reading this stunning chapbook, we get the sense the mermaids are themselves poets, and Wiseman is their trustworthy, imaginative, and attentive scribe.
– Stacey Waite
