new project ‘Florida Water’ uses poetic cadence as a kind of protest music – and it’s one that we should all be listening to.

is an artist who sits at the intersection of music, poetry, and activism. In her most recent body of work, ‘Florida Water’, she reflects on her migration to South Florida in search of love, connection, and belonging. Almost eight years since her first collection of poems, , was released, Monet’s evolution as both poet and community organiser has become increasingly visible and intentional. 

For someone whose work feels so transcendent, Monet’s presence, albeit over Zoom, was grounding and down-to-earth. “I’m a dense gal” she quips early on, laughing at herself with such ease. I found myself smiling at how real she was. 

Monet wrote ‘Florida Water’ over an eight-year span while living in the state. During that time, she was involved with the , a National Black Freedom organisation advocating for the end of police brutality, prison abolition, and the dismantling of systems that criminalise marginalised communities. Between door-knocking and campaigning, Monet wove her poetry into the fabric of their community. “I’m a different kind of poet” she tells me, “Whilst poetry for some is an isolated individualistic outlet […]  my work is about collective care and community”. The work at Dream Defenders, she says, and the community it fostered, “allowed people to be full human beings–to laugh, to dance, to sing, to throw back their heads and to remember what it is that we’re actually fighting for”. 

Monet recognises the profound power poetry has to unite people and to encourage vulnerability. “To me, poetry is the invitation to the full spectrum of our humanity; it’s the place where you deal with the interior–you deal with the feelings, the emotional truths that come about from experience, the stories, the memories, that make us full, expansive human beings”. For Monet, poetry is an attempt to undo the process of dehumanisation that has long diminished the autonomy of oppressed communities. Poetry, both literally and metaphorically, gives them back their voices. 

Zooming out from the intimacy of voice and community, ‘Florida Water’ operates on a larger scale. It weaves together the personal and the political, holding up a mirror to both ourselves and the Western geopolitical system, asking: what world do we want to live in? Monet’s work channels the voices of the marginalised and demands to be heard, archiving time while attempting to change the tides of the present. And like those tides, we are in a constant state of becoming, shaped by forces both seen and unseen.

For Monet, this idea of becoming is embodied in the metaphor of water, whose significance, she tells me, lies in its “consistency in the inconsistency”. It acts as a kind of “spiritual guide” that shows up in countless forms: “It has memory, it has information about us, it dictates where life can live. There’s a lot for us to be concerned with about water”. Living in Florida, she shares, made water feel much more real. Its presence lays bare both human need and ecological limits, dictating the very quality of life. Monet found herself face-to-face with the body politic of water: how “brutal confrontation of nature reveals our humanity and confronts it”. 

Like other forms of nature, water holds history and memory. “And it humbles you”, she reflects. “The humility, the grace, the patience, the compassion […] We’re here to be touched by each other. Wherever the water reaches will be touched.” In Monet’s vision, water is a living force that reminds us of our shared vulnerability.  And just as water shaped her connection to place and memory, so too did sound come to redefine her sense of belonging and self.

That connection to sound began in New York, where Monet spent her formative years, a city she describes as saturated with “humans making noise and the music of people living together”, something, she says, that “made [her] feel at home. When she moved to Florida, she was confronted with something she feared: silence. “Scared of a place where people were not,” she found herself becoming more attuned to the sounds and forces of nature, with only the hum of the ocean and the chatter of cicadas to ground her. And with the sound of the waves, she muses, came the voices of all her ancestors “who had to traverse the rhythms of the ocean in order for us to be here”. And that, she tells me, “all lives in the musicality of the language.”

It’s in this convergence of sound, memory, and inheritance that ‘Florida Water’ finds its pulse. The collection is rooted in ancestry, lineage, and the delicate synchronicity of life: how the past, present, and future constantly inform each other, moving cyclically and speaking to one another. This living conversation then continues in our words. Monet’s work reveals the power of language and poetry to interrupt the structures of geographical ownership that have long dictated our planet. To close our conversation, I ask Monet: What do you whisper to yourself when the world feels really heavy? She pauses, “Remember that the universe is always conspiring in your favour.” This simple yet profound reminder speaks to the resilience and hope that underpin her work, even amid hardship.

Monet’s ‘Florida Water’ inhabits a unique space where poetry flows like music and activism hums beneath every line. It’s a reminder that our voices carry power, not just to express, but to challenge, to unite, and to inspire change. Through her work, Monet encourages us to listen deeply and to consider the impact of our own noise: what rhythms we create and the legacy they leave behind.

‘These poems, like the cleansing waters of spiritual baths, rinse, reflect, and reveal the raw truths that lie within’.

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