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About Beyond the Watershed

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.

Praise for Beyond the Watershed

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

Sample Poetry From Beyond the Watershed

From Haiti to New York

The Port-de-Paix sun was hiding
that day. I was on my way to work,
he was standing on his porch, his eyes
trailing me like the wind. His cheeks
stood upright as he bid me bon jounen
each morning. I always smiled, bid him
the same, and kept walking until one
day he asked m’ ta remen evite'w al mange.
And this time, I stopped. Told him he
must meet my parents before he could
take me to dinner. Without a second
thought he agreed. That day, I floated
to work like a child. My parents approved
of this man who came to our home with clean,
unfurled hands. Our love was a rooster’s song,
sudden as lightning. His heart was made of
mangoes and sugarcane. We married during a year
without a surge, in a Catholic Church whose name
I can’t remember. Our parents looked on in wells
of joy, knowing little of the future that would strip us
in the palm of its hands. Cola Lacaye and bouyon
waited for us in the reception hall. We danced into
the signing of the book that sealed the pact we honor,
even when the universe begs us not to, on its knees,
with tears on its back. He flew to New York and built
a home where I joined him, brim-bellied with life. When
I gave birth to a quiet death, I also gave birth to you. Never
marry someone like your father. Whippings from his gravel
tongue leave stains I can’t scrub away. His hands rip the soul
from my chest as we struggle to learn English, raise you girls
and work to keep the rain off our heads. Don’t be like me.
I married too soon. There is no love here and the misery
that lives in this home is nothing the good Lord would want.

— Originally published in Texas Review 

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.
In this world, we don’t have to lower our
heads or bend. Everywhere we go, so does
the water. Our hair shimmies at the clouds
& make songs with the wind. No rape,
no black eyes, no pockets or souls sucked
dry, no one to lead us away from this home.
Everything we can dream is blooming & true.

— Originally published in Wild Imperfections: An Anthology of Womanist Poems