Review of Water in Every Room

Thanks to WOW Blog Tours for giving me the opportunity to try something I don't often read - poetry. You can read some reviews from readers who probably know a lot more about poetry, as well an author interview HERE. You can also enter to win a copy of Water in Every Room.

More About Water in Every Room

Water in Every Room embodies the fluctuations of emotion and form in new motherhood. Ferocious and tender, tending and transformed, mother embraces both her child and the dualities of self in this collection of poems.

More about Heather Brown Barrett

Heather Brown Barrett is an award-winning poet and writer in southeastern Virginia. She mothers her young son and contemplates life, the universe, and everything with her writer husband. She is a Cherokee Nation citizen, the current Membership Chair of The Poetry Society of Virginia, a member of The Muse Writers Center, and a former board member of Hampton Roads Writers.

Her work has appeared in Literary Mama, The Ekphrastic Review, Yellow Arrow Journal,

formidable Woman sanctuary, Black Bough Poetry, OyeDrum, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for Best of the Net. Her poetry is featured in the global TELEPHONE exhibition, was previously featured on the Dahlgren Railroad Heritage Trail as part of The Poetry Society of Virginia’s Poetry on the Trail project, and previously in the Suffolk Center for Cultural Arts Everyone Has a Story exhibit.

Much of her work is influenced by themes and dualities of motherhood, modes of forgiveness and grace, the structures of curiosity, time, and attention, and the types of subjects that plague most poets, like death, grocery stores, and birds.

Thoughts about Water in Every Room

First, I want to let you know that I am not a poetry expert. In fact, I am often the person who reacts to a poem with "I don't get it." or "It's about X? Seriously?" So please keep in mind that my thoughts are the thoughts of an average person who struggled through one class on American poetry in college.

Water in Every Room is a combination of two things every parent knows. Literary drawings of the scenes we all live - the mountains of laundry, the finger paints, the baby giggles. But if you look beyond that you can find the overwhelming emotions - the love, the fear, the discovery. These poems run the gamut from joyful celebrations of mothering to honest exhaustion to haunting memories of past thoughts. I feel Heather Brown Barrett did a fine job capturing motherhood in a way that we all recognize a glimpse of ourself in her poems.

Want to Win?

Enter to win a copy of Water in Every Room by entering HERE by May 17.

s 2025), a collection of poems embodying the fluctuations of emotion and form in new motherhood.