you can still drown in the shallows by Devon Fulford (Roadside Press) is available for pre-order now at magicaljeep.com
From the epigraph of Devon Fulford’s gripping new collection, we know we’re in a place of wreckage. Where a bridge may break underneath us, and what we think we know refuses to behave politely. There’s an insistence to it, one that splits us open even as it’s stitching us up.
You Can Still Drown in the Shallows gives us a good needling, after all. Boldly irreverent and unabashedly potty-mouthed, these poems challenge us to look closely at the broken world. Look at it, demands each speaker, like a dare. Blink and the poem wins. Keep your eyes open and the spoils are yours.
And such spoils they are. The day at the beach when the seagulls eat a baby. Baking bread without your thumbs. The desert as the truth bent sideways. In its way, Fulford’s writing, too, is deliciously sideways. Each piece lives in the midsection between poetry and flash. Between body horror and vaunting hope. We crane our heads to look because it’s well worth a strain to the neck.
And if there’s a hint of something wicked here, just know this is a book that asks for neither pity nor despair. These speakers are firmly in control of their own destinies, whether meeting a tsunami with apathy or pissing in the back seat of a Tacoma that belongs to a cheating lover. Sure, we can drown in the shallows, but there is nothing shallow here. Just ants in the honey, sin, and the rapture of the deep.
Christy Prahl (she/her) is an Illinois Arts Council grant recipient and the author of the poetry collections We Are Reckless (Cornerstone Press, 2023), With Her Hair on Fire (Roadside Press, 2025), and Catalog of Labors (Unsolicited Press, forthcoming 2026). A Best of the Net and three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has been featured in Poetry Daily as well as many national and international journals, including the Asheville Poetry Review, CALYX, Louisville Review, Sugar House Review, Salt Hill Journal, Penn Review, Tar River Poetry, and others. She splits her time between a small workers’ cottage in Chicago and refurbished Quonset hut in rural southwest Michigan. More at https://christyprahl.wixsite.
