Book Review

When I was considering American University’s MFA program, it was then-student Patricia Coral who convinced me to come. You can study across genres here, she told me, which was a departure from the vast majority of programs, which did not make room for such exploration.

Oftentimes writing between genres means picking one—classifying a work as fiction or poetry or memoir or nonfiction, when it is not just one thing. Coral’s 2024 debut memoir, Women Surrounded by Water, is a genre-bending journey through the liminal spaces of healing in the wake of great loss as the narrator recovers from divorce, loss, and a hurricane that shatters her island. Infused with rich sensory detail and powerful scenic work, the fragmented form is an intimate examination of the narrator’s own debris as she finds power in salvaging the pieces that matter most.

Coral is Puerto Rican and bilingual and is currently D.C. based, by way of Houston. Her work is frequently hybrid in its fusion of form and language and rawly honest about her own movement through place, language, and culture. Coral’s poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and translation focus on the in-between, her work employing innovative forms to explore her experience as part of the Puerto Rican diaspora and investigate the hybridity of her own experiences; she blurs the lines of genre and language, subverting traditional (read: colonial) forms to center experiences that otherwise have minimal literary representation. Coral’s book is the latest in Ohio State’s series Machete, which gives space to artists like Coral who push formal boundaries. Authors have always challenged form (think The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros or In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado), and today more publishers like Ohio State are willing—eager even—to name the purpose and importance of the disruption, giving artists space to communicate stories that have never been told before and enabling readers to access them.

Hybrid forms like Coral’s demonstrate the power of literary innovation to advance how and why we tell our stories. Women Surrounded by Water starts with a nontraditional trigger warning that is both a warning and an invitation into the fragmented form that follows: “Should I type now, Trigger Warning?” Coral asks, and then, “Do I know what’s your trigger?” Coral offers, “My triggers are phone calls from the island in the middle of the night.” The first section of the book grounds us in Coral’s foundational experiences, introducing us to the narrator’s first home of Puerto Rico, the beauty of the landscape, richness of the food, and constraining forces of patriarchy, which entrapped and shamed the narrator’s grandmother, aunts, and mother. The narrator reflects generously about growing up female in a land that mostly values men. “They didn’t teach me about my strengths, only the dangers of who I was,” Coral writes. Oscillating between childhood and young adulthood, the narrator introduces the family that raised her and the terrible marriage she stepped into. As her husband struggles with worsening drug and alcohol dependencies, the narrator becomes consumed by his care. “No le dejes solo,” or, don’t leave him alone, her mother, grandmother and aunts advise her. The tension mounts across the disparate marriage section of the book, which are interspersed with family portraits. The narrator speaks with great respect to her ancestors, recognizing their pain and sacrifice, and in parallel we see her realize that her marriage has tied her to her husband’s chaos. The effect of this steady variation is one of panic, the narrator facing an acute fear that she has betrayed her ancestors by being with such a man.

The second section is even more fractured than the first, featuring three subsections each containing many pieces. In “diasporic essays I-IV,” the narrator examines her identity after leaving her marriage, and the island, for a fresh start in Houston. The move is as much a liberation as it is a crisis. “What if English shrank me,” she asks. When Hurricane Maria hits, she frantically watches from afar. Unable to reach her family, she pores over the local news station until it also goes dark, then cobbles together coverage from posts on Facebook and elsewhere, every update illuminating new horrors of the disaster.

The structure of the book is admittedly a little disorienting at first—exhibiting the turbulence of Maria, of addiction, of loss—but Coral, from the other side of all of it, guides the reader with great intentionality. Prayers that start, “Breathe In,” and finish, “Breathe Out,” encourage readers to breathe—to slow the body, slow the mind, and examine our own somatic experience reading the work, which is intense in its content. Coral trusts the reader to trust her—this is how you can experience across genres, she seems to say. With prowess, she has pieced together a mosaic of feeling and history and disaster and endurance, each fragment precisely placed to process unimaginable hardship. This book is an ode, a goodbye, a memory. She’s moving forward with what matters—her family, her independence, her connection to her homeland, her words—and with this book she bravely holds up what maybe looks most like a broken mirror. In her final sections, Coral returns to the opening feeling of Women Surrounded by Water, again oscillating between family history and self, but this time digging in more deeply to the dangers of being a woman in Puerto Rico and honoring all those who did not, could not, survive.