Beyond the Watershed

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A hybrid collection of poetry and photography, Beyond the Watershed explores the various experiences of a Haitian American daughter and her Haitian immigrant mother. Nadia Alexis crafts a moving portrayal of generational trauma, domestic violence, survival, and reclamation using stunning imagery drawn from the body, spirit, nature, and cityscapes. Alexis traces journeys to break free–documenting pain, making space for light, becoming a reckoning, connecting with spirit, and writing oneself into new seasons of safe waters, healthy love, and transformation. This vital debut affirms that there’s “nothing like the thirst / of Black girls who believe in their own dreams,” even as they navigate nonlinear paths to healing. “Sometimes the clouds speak to me / & tell me to look beyond the burning,” the daughter declares as she charts her own path forward.

Nadia Alexis, a Harlem, New York City native, is a poet, writer, photographer, and daughter of Haitian immigrants. Her writing has been published in Poets & Writers,The Global South, Shenandoah, Wild Imperfections: An Anthology of Womanist Poems, and others. A fellow of both The Watering Hole and the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, she has received several honors, including the 2023 Poet of the Year of the Haitian Creatives Digital Awards, a 2020 semifinalist of the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, and 2019 Honorable Mention Poetry Prize from the Hurston/Wright College Writers Award. She holds an MFA and a PhD from the University of Mississippi.

from Watershed

I arrive at my father’s feet a dying
mapou tree. He covers his eyes with
mud while goats feast on my fallen hair.

I hear my mother call for the Lord
to send just enough rain for our lungs
& her carnations to see a new season.

My mother always said boys are best
at taking. I once loved a boy who turned
pomegranates in my yard into salt.

My mother & I kneel on uncooked rice.
Sweat of our hands no longer remembers
its owner. Our knees become prunes.

One night, I see my father weep & rock
like a forgotten river. How he must know
what it’s like to fight against disappearance.

The longer I stay in the home my lover & I
built on this mountain, the more I tire
of circadian leaps into the field of cacti.

Every year Lake Azuéi rises & forces change
on the trees & birds & people of the watershed.
They no longer believe the water will leave.

from Prayer to Èzili Dantò

In my dreams, I run across the ocean &
become more woman with each wave.
Something like you. I fly bruiseless &
renewed by the blue suns. Assemblies

of mothers & daughters sing & laugh
big until we all fly hand-in-hand. We sweat
& become our own guava horizons. Every
coconut tree is a city that welcomes us.

No one tries to take the moon from our teeth.

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 blueprints for discovery, an assignment in living unabashedly, lyrics 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 “Èzili Dantò’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

100 pages
Nadia Alexis
Pub date – March 2025
Trade paper – 6 x 9″
$18
ISBN:978-1-960327-09-3
Emerging Voices in Poetry