Notes on Swimming

Notes on Swimming, Arthur Lawson's debut pamphlet, draws the queer self into a sustained nautical idiom in which bodies dissolve into sand, sink like whales, or wake feathered as swans. Across these poems, domestic interiors become submarines and kettles boil into oceanic dioramas, the marine world functioning less as setting than as the available vocabulary for dissociation, suppression and grief. Lawson moves between intimate address and oblique third person, and between airy lyric fragments and denser prose-leaning pieces, holding family, sexual harm and mental fragility within a single, slowly drifting register. The result is a quietly disquieting collection, attentive to how readily a body might forget its own shape.