by Yazmin Monét Watkins
By Angélique “Angel” Gravely
In the epigraph of Yazmin Monét Watkins’s poetry collection, A Vessel Born to Float, she declares, “For us. I see you sis.” Upon reading those words, I immediately felt a litany of desires for this book flowing out of my soul. If she really saw me, I wanted her poems to disrobe me and lay bare parts of my heart I hadn’t yet put into words. If she really wrote this for us, I wanted her poems to assure me that she understood how joy, grief, certainty, and doubt were all making a home in my Black, bisexual woman skin. In a season when I was desperate for ways to return to myself, I yearned for her poems to confirm it wasn’t foolish to believe that every single one of us living in the borderlands, especially Black bi women, have a right to be seen, known, and understood. Fortunately, Watkins met my desires at nearly every turn.
Throughout each of the four sections of the book, Watkins explores from various angles what it means to be multitudinous, inviting readers to claim our own multitudes as she excavates aspects of hers. In the first section, “Expanding,” she establishes herself as part future and part past. Part love and part rage. Part dreamer and part realist. She is someone who makes intentional choices and someone who intentionally refuses to choose. More than anything, she is a heart expanding again and again towards love in every form, lovers of different genders, a more just society, and a freedom that has space for both grief and joy.
Her second section, “Crashing,” builds on the introductory poems by exploring in more depth how expansion leads us into collisions with the world around us. Collisions that often leave us juggling feelings that don’t neatly coexist. Throughout this section, Watkins is frustrated and hopeful. Spiraling and centered. Instructional and experiential. Unsettled and indignant. She establishes with concise authenticity exactly why “Filling,” the third section, is a necessity. Even in its usefulness, crashing can be depleting.
In response to the depletion, Watkins uses the third section to show us how to pour gold into our cracked places through love, connection, sex, and community. She invites us to consider what it would look like to nourish our whole self and to commit to the belief we deserve abundance. An invitation which leads easily into the final section, “Floating,” where she doubles down on this gospel of abundance and multidirectional care. Like the first section, “Floating” reminds us we are expansive. This expansiveness, however, is more than holding multiple identities, more than feelings and experiences dredged from disparate corners of one heart. This expansiveness is a celebration of a multiplicitous, multilayered life, buoyed by the soul-deep knowing that we deserve to thrive.
The result of these sections considered in their totality is a testament to the power of showing up authentically and to loving ourselves and each other enough to demand to be seen. Watkins hones in on this in her final poem, “Who Am I,” where she declares:
I say I am a Black bisexual poet/screenwriter/actor/comedian/
improviser/producer/teaching artist/more
creating worlds that look like us
So that anyone who hears my voice will see their truth reflected back”
I encourage other readers to listen to her voice. Maybe, like me, it’s your time, finally, to be seen.
Angélique “Angel’’ Gravely is a writer, educator, and advocate based in Philadelphia, PA, in the U.S. Find more of her work at angelgravely.com.