The Water Is Never Shallow
Devon Fulford’s you can still drown in the shallows
There are books of poems that invite admiration for their construction, and there are books less interested in being admired than in getting close enough to leave a bruise. Devon Fulford’s you can still drown in the shallows, published by Roadside Press in 2026, belongs decidedly to the latter category. Its sixteen poems occupy only nineteen pages, but Fulford packs that small space with grief, sex, domestic dread, black comedy, memory, desire, and the recklessness that can follow loss.
The title is also the book’s governing proposition: catastrophe does not require deep water. A kitchen will do. A motel room. A marriage. A dance floor. A bed. The dangerous places in Fulford’s poems are frequently ordinary ones. The collection repeatedly collapses the distinction between disaster and daily life until drowning becomes less an event than a condition of being alive.
That idea announces itself in the opening poem, “genesis 1:3,” where creation is reimagined not as illumination but detonation: “maybe the big bang was just the gun / going off in god’s closed mouth—”. The poem ends by placing violence and language on strangely equivalent terms: “give us bloodshed or give us words, / either way, we’re going to be loud.” In four lines, Fulford supplies something like an ars poetica for the collection. Words are not decorous substitutes for violence; they participate in the same explosive economy.
Water enters early and refuses to behave like a single, manageable metaphor. In “if only virginia woolf had texted me,” the narrator walks another person “back from the water,” then rejects the grandeur of rescue: “don’t call me hero, i’ll / be your bathwater, instead—”. The potentially monumental is dragged toward the bodily and domestic. Ocean becomes bathwater; salvation becomes intimacy.
Then comes “submerged,” the poem that gives the collection its title. Tsunami, kitchen floor, ants, honey, damaged linoleum, swimming pools, seagulls, and family snapshots accumulate in a landscape where domestic memory and natural disaster become almost indistinguishable. The poem arrives at its deceptively simple recognition: “what a shame you can still / drown in the shallows.”
This line alters the poems around it. The danger is not necessarily spectacular disaster but accumulation: grief that doesn’t leave, desire that compromises judgment, the house retaining what happened inside it, the body remembering what consciousness would prefer to discard.
The domestic world is especially treacherous. In “and the bread will burn,” baking, nightmares, the dead, a cracked floor, and a malfunctioning stove coexist without hierarchy. Flour becomes improvised caulk while the stove “never knows / how to stop getting too hot.” Fulford makes ordinary objects bear psychological pressure without announcing that they are symbols. Everything in the room seems to have absorbed emotional history.
This helps explain why the collection’s surrealism works. Fulford rarely abandons the physical world for abstraction; she pushes physical things half a turn beyond realism. In “haunted,” the speaker threatens to “crumple / the moon.” Elsewhere, lovers sprinkle milk into motel-room corners, a desert becomes “the truth bent / sideways,” and a child explodes “into starflower / wild over the desert floor.” The images are strange, but Fulford delivers them matter-of-factly. The poems never stop to explain their own weirdness.
Sex is equally resistant to explanation. It is funny, restorative, destructive, absurd, communal, faithless, and sometimes all those things at once. “club static” compresses an entire nightlife mythology into gin, dancing, bodies, and sundown. In “relieving oneself takes copious forms,” three women respond to a man declaring he loves all three by urinating in the bed of his new Tacoma. Fulford has a gift for the indecorous detail that clarifies an emotional situation better than explanation could.
The collection’s emotional center may be “the afterlife begins with a casting couch.” Here Fulford makes explicit something implicit throughout the book: the strange alliance between grief and appetite. After Josh dies, “our whole town fucked each other,” as though sex might keep death occupied elsewhere. Death becomes a voyeur and the afterlife a film production.
The joke does not diminish the grief. It permits the poem to approach it.
Eventually the sexual frenzy reveals something darker: “it wasn’t just sex,” but “betrayals. drugs. booze.” The survivors engage in a “grim flirtation with fatalities” they are too young and grief-stricken to understand. Fulford refuses the convenient retrospective pose of wisdom. The poem understands what these people could not understand then without pretending that understanding repairs anything.
The refusal of tidy recovery is crucial. you can still drown in the shallows concerns survival but never converts survival into uplift. Fulford’s survivors remain horny, ridiculous, frightened, grieving, selfish, tender, and funny. They do not emerge purified.
The humor keeps the collection from buckling beneath its deaths, wounds, betrayals, and domestic terrors. In “butchered,” for instance, a “palpable bloodbath” caused by a manscaping accident delays a first meeting with “mama” before the poem swerves toward catastrophe of another order. Fulford’s world refuses to segregate tragedy from embarrassment. Human beings bleed while doing stupid things; somebody is crying while somebody else is trying to get laid.
The final poem, “hide and teeth (after kelly gray),” gathers many of these impulses into a different register. Desert replaces water as the dominant landscape, but desire remains elemental. The speaker asks for something surprisingly modest: “promise me you’ll / still laugh.”
That may be the quiet key to the collection. Laughter does not mean suffering has ended. Sex does not conquer death. Love does not necessarily save a marriage. Memory does not restore the dead. Poetry cannot repair the cracked floor. What these things can do is keep the living briefly, stubbornly in contact with one another.
The achievement of you can still drown in the shallows lies in Fulford’s understanding that the shallow end was never safe in the first place. Disaster does not always announce itself with deep water and enormous waves. Sometimes it is already inside the house, rattling the tin on the stove. And sometimes survival is nothing grander than remaining there long enough to laugh again.
While a resident of New York City, Richard Modiano became active in the literary community connected to the Poetry Project where he came to know Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, William S. Burroughs and Ted Berrigan. In 2001 he was a programmer at Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center, joined the Board of Trustees in 2006, and from 2010 to 2019, he served as Executive Director. The Huffington Post named him as one of 200 people doing the most to promote poetry in the United States. Modiano is the winner of the 2022 Joe Hill Prize for labor poetry and is a Pushcart Prize nominee.
