2023 Black Lawrence Press Chapbook Prize

Meghann Plunkett’s debut chapbook, What We Did To Her Made The Water Rise, explores the cross section between shoreline and the female form. This collection is set in the decay of the New England gothic aesthetic where the slow disintegration of an ocean-side community illuminates the ways women are worn down under traditional gender roles. A journey of intergenerational hardship is echoed throughout the stark oceanic imagery and a fraught mother and daughter dynamic. Plunkett’s broken structure and sound blurs the line between body and land, highlighting the similarities between earth erosion and the erosion of the female experience.

Praise

To read Meghann Plunkett’s work is to have an eternal internal debate: do I savor each delectable poem, ration out the brutal beauty, swallow this book one delicious pill at a time? Or do I feast on this generous collection in one overwhelming and unstoppable gorge? I cannot tell you how to read this, but I can promise that neither option will disappoint.

These poems, set in a Rhode Island girlhood amongst the deaths of Princess Diana and Jon Benet Ramsey, is an endless reflection on the violence that women inherit across the world, in their communities, and in their very own blood. I paused to write many of the lines down before I realized it was futile, I would never forget them. Quite simply, no one writes like Meghann Plunkett.

– Megan Falley, author of Drive Here and Devastate Me

In What We Did To Her Made The Water Rise, Meghann Plunkett details the violent demands beauty makes on women’s bodies. Her mother’s, her own. Plunkett renders a daughter’s sense of home eroded—oceanic motions of a mother’s addiction; sex timed to the banging of a butcher’s knife; glamor shots juxtaposed with relapse. This is a poetics of startling resilience and presence: “still, desire does not have / to leave you / ruined.”

-Ava Nathaniel Winter, author of Transgenesis

In this crackling debut by Meghann Plunkett, the death of the matriarch brings the poetic speaker face-to-face with a thorny past: a shipwreck in the living room, a world where violence at the hands of men soldiers women together. The winning mix of potent figurative imagery with intense subject matter tugs the reader in two directions: up into the imagination and down into the trenches of feeling.

-Jeffrey McDaniel, author of Thin Ice Olympics