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Mother Water Ash, a wrenching new collection of poems by Nicole Cooley, explores both personal grief and environmental crisis, the storms, fires and floods that now dominate our world. At its core, the book asks what it means to experience personal loss in the face of this ecological catastrophe, specifically amid environments throughout New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Focusing on her mother's sudden death, this is a book about profound loss but also recovery. Poems in the collection seek to find a new language and form for grief, as Cooley deploys a range of poetic forms, from free verse to fixed forms to the lyric essay to prose poems to monochords, in search of ways to capture the fluctuations of grieving. The poems also examine the experience of mothering as they document the speaker's life as a mother, navigating the loss of her own mother. Some of the book's driving questions include how do we mourn a mother and continue to mother ourselves? How do we live in a world that feels on the brink of destruction? What can poetry do in the face of environmental crisis? In answer, Mother Water Ash offers poems of stark emotion, evocative detail and abiding endurance as responses to overwhelming grief.