How do we live in a house haunted by those we once invited inside? Rob Macaisa Colgate’s drama in verse, My Love is Water, defies category and ignites the imagination. Set in Danilo’s party, a whir of ecstatic energy gestates in and around aloneness, language, spilling-over care, untouchedness, diaspora, schizophrenia, Amerikan moments, homeness, desire, connectivity, dangerous love, kabaklaan, and performance. 'Let’s lose our minds with Dani / and his lost mind,' says Mari, the psychiatric nurse, as she swirls within the night’s white noise. Danilo confesses in lyrical monologues, 'I have never been so absent… All love starts as water.' Colgate wields their intuitive poetical force in vibrant theatrical scenes where the collective of PARTYGOERS become silhouettes, Danilo’s mind extends outward into dream-states of shifting lights, ocean waves crash toward big stillness, and the darkness sounds like a promise. Deliciously strange, deliciously heart wrenching—this book radiates pure magic. Where ideas float like unimpressed ghosts, the polyvocalic compounds, and the Filipino nurses become Colgate’s rendition of the Three Fates—collectively weaving daring lyricism— to leave a reader breathless, lusty in the weight. Full of spectral visitors, longing, wild embodiments of verse, celestial navigations, and haunting echoes of a former lover, My Love is Water is an entranced fever-dream of what lurks inside loss, selfhood, and the mind.

Rob Macaisa Colgate’s expertly choreographed My Love is Water stages a Boystown house party you won’t soon forget, populated by an unlikely mix of Filipina exchange nurses and gay Grindr friends. At the center of this theatrical space of excess and enlightenment, our host, the recently dumped Danilo, enacts a messy and moving meditation on care, disability, and queerness; on the cruel promises of empire; and, especially, on outsized and lopsided love.

In these tender, witty, daring poems, Colgate takes up the transformative work of exploring identity and experience in all their discoball-glittering, light-throwing, prismatic refractions. The result is a miraculous combination of witness and ode to the gorgeous and brutal facets of embodied life.