For Want of Water

Sasha Pimentel's For Want of Water (Beacon Press, 2017) was selected by Gregory Pardlo as a winner of the National Poetry Series.

In the foreword, Pardlo writes, "Pimentel, a Filipina poet raised in the United States and Saudi Arabia, lives with her family on a farm near the border of Ciudad Juárez, México, in El Paso, Texas. While prepositional phrases in a sentence like the one before this might link neatly and sequentially on the page (on a farm, in El Paso, with her family), in reality, the conditions overlap and nest inside one another boundlessly, like sight lines in an M. C. Escher drawing. The personal is political, and the local is global—these aphorisms hold objective weight in Pimentel’s poems without surrendering responsibility for perspective and interpretation."