"The bright and genuine poems in Marianne Paul's debut poetry collection, Above and Below the Waterline, express awe of the everyday life in visual, affable, candid language. Water imagery is dominant, and the lyrics and narratives glide across the water, always in bold and open strokes."
Elana Wolff, You Speak to Me in Trees
ISBN: 978-1-92695600-8
BookLand Press
The river winds through Above and Below the Waterline, the first collection of poetry by Marianne Paul. The author navigates the joy and the grief that is life in the process of being lived, those events and passages that mark the flow of time, the undercurrents of family, the rough waters and calm waters, the challenges and dysfunction - but beneath it all, love.
Water speaks volumes, Marianne Paul tells us. The poet learns to read river in the same way a child learns to read symbols on the page - the contours and patterns that hint of submerged rocks, that forewarn of swifts and rapids, the shallows, the gentleness and respite of flat waters.
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"Marianne Paul's Above and Below the Waterline, as you might expect, takes the reader on a river journey. What you don't expect, after you set down the book, is the phantom sensation, the swell and dip. Body memory still responding. It's your own life river she has evoked too."
Rae Crossman, performance poet