Winner of the 2024 Michael Waters Poetry Prize
The Red We Silk collects inherited migrations and the weight of familial journeys into a lyric investigation of displacement and longing. Memory abides in the body and the body in memory, propelling the speaker through geographical and spiritual landscapes, desires, and griefs toward the transformative work of discovery. Tender, attentive, and multivocal, these are poems of belonging beyond borders.
“The Red We Silk is an impressive debut that captures with elegance and ease the truly twenty-first century phenomenon of multiple migrations and cultural intersections as they manifest in the body of a gifted poet. Nicole Lachat frames these considerations within the Peruvian myth of Chasqui, who becomes for her a migrant voicing the poetic implications of uprooting and replanting in different spaces. Lachat’s brilliantly generous poems of deep sentiment and spiritual interrogation explore themes of family, memory, place, and desire with resonant beauty.”
–Kwame Dawes
“Reader, this is no ordinary debut. Nicole Lachat knows that all borders are lies. Citizen and immigrant. Land and body. Parent and child. The quick and the dead. Whatever lines you believe in, whatever lines you draw, prepare to have them dissolved. ‘Because you come / ready for war—swearing lightning, swearing / thunder—I come light-footed. I become / leaf.’ Lachat is here to say that no one has the right to divide us, not even us, that our survival depends on this: knowing we are each other, knowing we can still become our softest selves. The Red We Silk will change you.”
–Rebecca Gayle Howell
“In this timely debut, Nicole Lachat’s lyric verve shapes the very ground of ordinary living into a personal history that threads memory with an urgent desire for bonds that survive and transform the temporal, emotional, and otherwise disfiguring work of distance. Arresting and smashing.”
–Canisia Lubrin
