Radiant Wound: Cara Waterfall’s Luminous Debut Reckons with Identity, Violence, and the Radical Act of Survival
Unsolicited Press announces the release of Radiant Wound by Cara Waterfall, a debut collection of poetry arriving May 20, 2025.
In Radiant Wound, Cara Waterfall writes with a clarity that cuts and a tenderness that mends, tracing the jagged contours of life as a woman, a foreigner, and an artist in post-war Côte d'Ivoire. This arresting collection is both anthem and elegy—a fearless testament to resilience and the indelible marks left by history, language, and the bodies we inhabit.
Waterfall’s poetry emerges from the liminal spaces between cultures and across silences, bearing witness to the political fractures and intimate reverberations of war. Supported by a National Geographic Glimpse Correspondents Program grant, her verses are stitched from field notes and lived experience: women rising from the margins, children navigating precarity, and the everyday choreography of survival in Abidjan’s streets and riverbanks. Here, no detail is too small—no life too overlooked—to merit the full force of her lyrical gaze.
In poems that traverse colonial pasts, contested presents, and uncertain futures, Waterfall refuses erasure. Radiant Wound pulses with what feminist theorist Audre Lorde named the erotic: a wellspring of creative power born of deep feeling and deep knowing. Whether meditating on the quiet resilience of women who mother amid crisis or invoking the ache of longing and belonging, Waterfall’s voice is unflinching. Her language, "chiseled and wildly alive," conjures the body as both site of rupture and repository of strength, a testament to the scars—and songs—we carry forward.
Jennifer K. Sweeney, author of Foxlogic, Fireweed, praises Waterfall’s craft:
“Her lyrical ‘I’ continually remakes self, allowing place to change her... Cara Waterfall possesses the rare ability to write into ‘the between-work’ of a land, a culture, a language and reveal the radiant remnants of survival.”
Award-winning author Chelene Knight calls Radiant Wound “alive... a vivid, three-dimensional experience that invites us to reflect on the proximity of our own stories.”
With deft precision and hard-won grace, Radiant Wound is a clarion call: to witness, to remember, and to rise—again and again.
About the Author:
Cara Waterfall is an Ottawa-born, Côte d’Ivoire-based poet, storyteller, and mentor whose work braids identity, place, and generational memory. Her poems have appeared in Best Canadian Poetry, SWWIM, The Night Heron Barks, and beyond. Winner of the PULPLiterature Magpie Award and a multiple-time finalist for Radar Poetry’s Coniston Prize, she mentors writers through creative transitions and is the founder of Archipel, a Substack community launching in 2024. Radiant Wound is her debut collection.
Radiant Wound
By Cara Waterfall
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 978-1-963115-77-2
Publication Date: May 20, 2025
Publisher: Unsolicited Press
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