If you’re looking for a book about what it means being home, leaving home, waiting to return to home, and knowing both you and home won’t be the same when you get back, this is the book for you. Bottomlands by Madeline Trosclair-Rotolo shows her reader “an inevitable washing/away where only so much can stay behind to bear witness” (13). This collection of poems shows their reader how much place can mean to a person and how the nature of where we live can encroach on who we become.
Madeline Trosclair-Rotolo’s Bottomlands gives us a speaker that becomes tropical storm. The speaker of the poems speaks to the reader by saying: “I am an endless stream//of hot gulf air awaiting a name” (15). The reader will see that the speaker of the poems matches the emotions and destruction of the environment they call home. The essence of hurricane season becomes a part of the speaker’s nature. We see our speaker, at times, aspire to be capable of the level of destruction they’ve seen the storms hold. They often look up to the power of the natural disasters they have witnessed. But this poem of collections is not one built on fearing and running away, it is structured in a way in which we see the speaker’s want to reclaim the strength of the storms they have seen take from them, time after time.
Poems like “Lament for the River’s Loss”, use repetition to hold onto the memory of things physically and emotionally washed away by storms of the past. The speaker understands themself through the traditions and rituals of storm preparations, shown in the poem: “Get Your Generators Here”. There are poems that show the conditioning and second nature for survival created by the always daunting truth that a storm is on the horizon. The culture of the speaker’s homeland has created a unique common sense in those who also reside there. The culture for survival embedded in the speaker is also how the speaker grows to understand the world around them.
In Bottomlands, the speaker is compared to a storm by family members. They associate themselves and their path through life like a storm. In “Lament for the River’s Loss”, the speaker says: “I remember my mother telling me I make category fives out of 3pm storms” (17). A later poem, “Geographies”, tells us “It is easy to be dwarfed as a child, easy to be made small/when a category fives has a width of 3oo miles.” (20). The speaker defines themself through comparison to the storm.
This collection hints at the permanence of objects and people in areas that get targeted by storms. We know what is happening to them through the progression of the storms. The world created on the page also mirrors and foreshadows the actions being taken to help prevent or alleviate damages to the land from future destruction caused by erosion and predicted storm patterns. In “We Drowned the Oysters this Year”, the lines “Rocking chairs etch their names into wooden/floorboards with each passing quake”, shows that through all the abrupt changes made to the land, there is a way to gradually leave a mark. A trace or proof that those living there existed and will remain, even if it takes them time to return.
There is a lot of mention of stillness and moving in the poems to emulate the way water and land functions before, during, and after a storm. The poems show how both the inhabitants and the inanimate objects, like water itself, function. We are told: “everyone stood and watched cities fishbowl” (14). We are told: “Sometimes we have to give ourselves over/to what the body softly chases” (31). We are told: “We drink in the rain together,/and talk about future plans” (35). We are also told: “Tombstones/ resurface, mouths agape and lopsided gasping/for a breath of muggy air” (41). Trosclair-Rotolo spares no part of the storm process and aftermath from these pages. They create a world so full of all the details of what gets affected by hurricane season, from the oysters to the alligators, to the overflowing sinks, to the highways and maps of grief.
Beaver Magazine 