Beyond the Watershed

Reviews / Votes

"If you are looking for a love story where the daughter learns through her mother's survival all the ways to eat a mango, cook a meal, bury desire, marry for thunder, or love with noise - these poems are the blueprint for discovery. An assignment in living unabashedly or a lyric for the moved spirit, Nadia Alexis prepares a place at humanity's table for her countrymen with kind hands. A quilt of Haitian language, Kreyol kinship, visual art, and hope, Beyond the Watershed invites every reader to bathe in the brilliance of Black women's burgeoning; Alexis writes us whole within these poetic prayers." -- Mahogany L. Browne, author of Chrome Valley "Nadia Alexis's heartrending and heart-mending debut collection, Beyond the Watershed , asks us to bear witness to chilling intimate partner violence, then the poet, like the "wounded rooster [who] sings of morning / like it wants to forget the night, // invites [our] eyes to open like curtains." A stunning poetic and visual account of survival that refuses to sugarcoat, Beyond the Watershed begins as prayer and ends as its own extraordinary answer to prayer." -- Eugenia Leigh, author of Bianca "'How many times have you imagined a lush field / of passion vines & keys to all doors you wish / to escape through?' Nadia Alexis asks in Beyond the Watershed. Her debut collection shatters and mourns in a blur of white dresses, wild grasses, stripped forests, and object portraits in black-and-white photographs that both soften and deepen the starkness of the poems. Even though "there's no choice / in how the wounding is served," an elegant and musical toughness of spirit underlies this bold-colored, lush-natured, raw-hearted work. We meet "Ezili Danto's child / armed with scarred vines & silver" as she navigates the caustic inheritances of repeated intimate violations, and oceans of colonial damage that will never disappear. But we also witness elemental transformations as we hear the praise songs, when she awakens to the power of a world she can make for herself. In it, prayers and imagination, self-protection and voice-finding break the trap, make the scars of harm fade back until new skin grows over and, Alexis writes, "Everything we can dream is blooming & true." -- Khadijah Queen, author of Anodyne Finalist for the 2026 Nossrat Yassini Poetry Prize * Finalist for the 2026 Nossrat Yassini Poetry Prize * Longlisted for the 2025 Maya Angelou Book Award
* Longlisted for the 2025 Maya Angelou Book Award * Nominee for the 2026 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Award
* Nominee for the 2026 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Award * Finalist for the 2026 It's LIT! Literary Awards - Best Black Poetry Book
* Finalist for the 2026 It's LIT! Literary Awards - Best Black Poetry Book * Named one of Poets & Writers' Ten Best Debut Poets (2026) * Named one of Poets & Writers' Ten Best Debut Poets (2026) *