Requeening: Poems

by Amanda Moore

Overview

“A rare feat for any book of poems, let alone a debut, in that the lines, wrought with such deft precision and care, mark the sum total of a life richly lived and felt at the seat of poetry...These poems care, first and foremost, for what they write of and through, which is a much needed—yet increasingly rare—achievement.” — Ocean Vuong

Engaging the matriarchal structure of the beehive, Amanda Moore explores the various roles a woman plays in the family, the home, and the world at large. Beyond the productivity and excess, the sweetness and sting, Requeening brings together poems of motherhood and daughterhood, an evolving relationship of care and tending, responsibility and joy, dependence and deep love.

The poems that anchor this collection don’t shy away from the inevitability of a hive’s collapse and consider the succession of “requeening” a hive as “a new heart ready to be fed and broken and fed again.” The collapse is both physical—there are poems of illness and recovery—and emotional, as the mother-daughter relationship shifts, the daughter becoming separate, whole, and poised to displace. The liminal spaces these poems traverse in human relationships is echoed in a range of poetic and hybrid form, offering freedom and stricture as they contemplate the way we hold one another in love and grief.

Requeening is a vivid and surprising collection of poems from a winner of the National Poetry Series Open Competition. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780063096288
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	10/26/2021
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Amanda Moore is a poet and essayist whose work has appeared in journals and anthologies, including Best New Poets, ZYZZYVA, and Mamas and Papas: On the Sublime and Heartbreaking Art of Parenting. She teaches high school English and lives by the ocean in the Outer Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco.

Table of Contents

Opening the Hive 1

1729 Maple Avenue Northbrook IL 2

When I Hear "Horses" as "Corsets" 4

Aunt Annie's Sand 5

Sonnet While Killing a Chicken 7

Waggle Dance 8

My Life Still with Wasps 12

Which Came First 13

Ithaca 14

Foraging 15

The Broken Leg 16

Postern 18

While Killing Ants 19

Anniversary Declaration 20

Requeening 21

The Worker 24

20905 Caledonia Avenue Hazel Park MI 26

The Quickening 28

Labor as an Exotic Vacation 29

Calendula 30

Nursing 31

A Place, Asleep 33

Confession 34

Gone Song 35

At the Monument 36

Indication of Love 37

Domestic Short Hair 38

The Dead Thing 40

Love, a Burnin' Thing 41

Palinode 42

Omne Trium Perfectum 43

Haibun at the Waterfall 46

Morning Haibun with Tween 47

Haibun in the Middle of the Night 50

Haibun with Norovirus 51

Self-Defense Haibun 53

Haibun on the Ides of March 55

Sweet and Fitting Haibun 56

Collapse 58

3585 Mission Street San Francisco CA 59

Melanoma 61

After the Phone Call I Teach Book 11 62

Insomnia 64

Tumor Board 65

Postcard to My Left Axillary Lymph Nodes 66

Curls 67

The Last CT Scan 68

Gratitude 70

Found Notebooks Haibun 72

Tattoo Artist 74

Diagnosis 75

I Make Us Watch America's Got Talent 76

At the End 77

Next Lines 78

Elegy 79

At the Memorial Service 80

Aubade in the Hour Between 82

Everything Is a Sign Today 84

Afterswarm 86

Bad at Bees 88

Acknowledgments 91

Notes 95

Editorial Reviews

11/22/2021

Moore’s exquisite debut uses beekeeping and its attendant metaphors as a motif to explore childhood homes, marriage, and the birth of and raising of a child. Composed primarily of one to two-page free verse poems, the book also includes a dynamic set of haibuns (a Japanese form that joins a haiku and a prose poem) about her daughter’s girlhood, as “Morning Haibun with Tween”: “The girl can sleep now, hours and hours at a time—years since the last 2 am tiptoe down the hall to fold herself sweetly between us like a warm sheet.” Moore’s refusal to turn away from or sentimentalize hard moments is often leavened with humor, as the very titles of the poems suggest: “Labor as an Exotic Vacation” and “Postcard to My Left Axillary Lymph Nodes.” The final sentence of “Bad at Bees,” the four-page prose piece that closes the collection, provides an immediate retrospective focus: “I don’t really know what I’m doing most days. I just like to touch fear.” An homage to the power of matriarchy, Moore’s powerful collection will leave readers reflecting on the roles visible and invisible played by women. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"Moore’s debut collection is a winner of the 2020 National Poetry Series, and it’s clear why. Using imagery of the beehive and the matriarchal queen bee, Moore contemplates childbirth, motherhood, and marriage. A quietly profound work about the inevitable cycles of life." — O, the Oprah Magazine

"Pinpointing pivotal moments, Moore looks at the love and anger between mother and daughter, as well as the way the daughter replaces the mother as the one who brings new life into the family. These highly descriptive poems evoke a dreamlike state, one that is quick-moving and evocative, temporarily erasing actual and imagined boundaries." — Library Journal

“A rare feat for any book of poems, let alone a debut, in that the lines, wrought with such deft precision and care, mark the sum total of a life richly lived and felt at the seat of poetry...These poems care, first and foremost, for what they write of and through, which is a much needed—yet increasingly rare—achievement.” 
— Ocean Vuong

"In her outstanding debut collection, Requeening, Amanda Moore imaginatively parallels the life of a woman in her family with the life of the queen bee in the hive. These poems take us through the sleepless nights of early parenthood, drunk with joy, through illness and recovery, through grief and fierce love. Often these poems evince a hard-earned dark humor. Just as she receives a cancer diagnosis, she writes, My 9^th graders file into our room/ and I am at the whim of divine irony/...just as I have to teach a lesson/ on Odysseus’ journey to the Underworld. Always her images are precise and vivid, her understanding cogent, as when she compares mourning to Monet’s paintings: haystack, haystack, haystack...which is to say/ they are like this grief.../all the same but for the light. And when Moore describes the sand an Aunt collected from all over the world in a poem that ends, what we kept/ and what we stole, this past/ we’ve made from pilfered dust, we feel she is speaking a truth about all of our lives."
— Ellen Bass, author of Indigo

From the Publisher

"Moore’s debut collection is a winner of the 2020 National Poetry Series, and it’s clear why. Using imagery of the beehive and the matriarchal queen bee, Moore contemplates childbirth, motherhood, and marriage. A quietly profound work about the inevitable cycles of life."

the Oprah Magazine O

A rare feat for any book of poems, let alone a debut, in that the lines, wrought with such deft precision and care, mark the sum total of a life richly lived and felt at the seat of poetry...These poems care, first and foremost, for what they write of and through, which is a much needed—yet increasingly rare—achievement.” 

Ocean Vuong

"In her outstanding debut collection, Requeening, Amanda Moore imaginatively parallels the life of a woman in her family with the life of the queen bee in the hive. These poems take us through the sleepless nights of early parenthood, drunk with joy, through illness and recovery, through grief and fierce love. Often these poems evince a hard-earned dark humor. Just as she receives a cancer diagnosis, she writes, My 9^th graders file into our room/ and I am at the whim of divine irony/...just as I have to teach a lesson/ on Odysseus’ journey to the Underworld. Always her images are precise and vivid, her understanding cogent, as when she compares mourning to Monet’s paintings: haystack, haystack, haystack...which is to say/ they are like this grief.../all the same but for the light. And when Moore describes the sand an Aunt collected from all over the world in a poem that ends, what we kept/ and what we stole, this past/ we’ve made from pilfered dust, we feel she is speaking a truth about all of our lives."

Ellen Bass

09/01/2021

In an essay about her battle with cancer and her daughter's puberty, Moore says that she wants to balance her mother self with her writer self while respecting her daughter's need for privacy. She achieves this delicate balance in this collection, a National Poetry Series winner, which covers similar territory. In these poems, Moore posits the metaphor of a beehive and the process of requeening the hive as a way to focus on the relationship between mother and daughter. Set mostly in the past, the collection's plot line ranges from labor to birth and breastfeeding to childhood and adolescence, referencing the grandmother, the mother's past, places she lived, items she possessed, her illness, and chemotherapy. Moore's formal explorations include and sonnets, along with several haibun, a Japanese form developed by Basho (1644–1694). Moore's haibun, which combine prose poetry with haiku, make up the penultimate (and best) section of the book. Pinpointing pivotal moments, Moore looks at the love and anger between mother and daughter, as well as the way the daughter replaces the mother as the one who brings new life into the family. VERDICT These highly descriptive poems evoke a dreamlike state, one that is quick-moving and evocative, temporarily erasing actual and imagined boundaries.—C. Diane Scharper, Johns Hopkins Univ., Baltimore, MD

Library Journal