Upflow
Mexico City’s water system is the costliest and most absurd on the planet. Dams in neighboring states hydro-elevate water past drought-stricken communities before the water arrives, polluted and chemically treated, into the drained lakebed of Mexico City…where the water is used before black, residual wastewater finally filters back to the countryside to grow food for the city.
In Diego Gerard Morrison’s darkly funny, picaresque, and hydro-ethnological stories, Upflow follows the path of water in and out of Mexico City. Scarcity, pollution, corruption and even amplified earthquakes rise through the ghostly lakebed of Mexico City’s past to manifest in the present. Through surrealist and historical romps spanning the Spanish conquest, the subsequent desiccation of the lake, as well as modern stories warning of the near future, Upflow’s prescient fictions embody the fluid nature of water and how it often eludes those who need it most.
ISBN: 978-1-952897-52-8
167pg
Forthcoming on October 27, 2026
“Fluvial and lacustrine, the sentences of Diego Gerard Morrison's Upflow follow the routes, the methods and the moods of water itself as it floods, drips, drains, oozes, flows impossibly upwards thanks to human contrivances, sweeps along or subsides to reveal the intimacies and venialities that shape and are shaped by each new divagation and rearrival in the flow. As attentive to human prerogatives as to those of water, Upflow is a work of both stamina and tenderness, a lyric hydrology, “overflowing and ecstatic, forever sucking in the outpour.”
—Joyelle McSweeney, author of The Necropastoral
“A moving, shimmering kaleidoscope of a book that unfolds as a collection of narratives, histories and ecocriticism, Upflow brilliantly conjures the lacustrine past and arid present of the megacity to examine the lives, beset by loss and precarity, reflected in the flowing body of water.”
—Christine Lai, author of Landscapes
"In Upflow, Diego Gerard Morrison offers an unforgettable constellation of stories where water isn’t only water: it is also memory, violence, root and destiny. Employing a diaphanous prose and a natural instinct for dialogue, Morrison constructs a world of his own which is disturbingly similar to ours. A book that resonates in the reader like an incessant river’s murmur."
—Daniel Saldaña París, author of The Dance and the Fire