What It Means to Wade
Date
Authors
Reed, Dakota Marie
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
<i>What It Means to Wade</i> is a lyric essay structured in numbered sections of prose poetry. Composed in alternating anecdotal vignettes, inclusions of scientific research, and lyrical moments of contemplation, this essay explores the relationship between human and animal, between the self and one’s space, both physical and emotional. The essay contains a set of narratives that dance around each other: the speaker tells a story through slowly emerging fragments of her experience moving into a historically haunted house, while also revealing the years of alligator-related nightmares she’s experienced since. Relying heavily on associative leaps, the essay shifts back and forth between past and present, between the palpable and the imagined. Scientific research and Egyptian mythology relating back to alligators and crocodiles are incorporated throughout the piece, grounding the essay in fact while simultaneously posing rhetorical philosophical questions which arise from the uncovered information. From the desert-dwelling owner of a rattlesnake museum to American serial killer Joe Ball, from folklore’s Bluebeard to her own father, the speaker interrogates male figures and their potential for inciting fear or love, or sometimes both. In a seamless weaving together of personal and collective experiences, <i>What It Means to Wade</i> examines what it means to be a woman and what it means to move forward in spite of what recurs and what may lie ahead.