That Place Where You Opened Your Hands

by Susan Leslie Moore

Overview

Celebrating the tension between what we imagine and what we know the world to be, Susan Leslie Moore's debut collection moves between certainty and doubt, dead seriousness and determined playfulness. Exploring identity and the exterior and interior selves we create through the natural world, language, and relationships, the poems of That Place Where You Opened Your Hands bring the ordinary rhythms of life and motherhood into coexistence with wilder truths. As Moore writes, "If I can't be singular / in purpose, let me be quietly adrift," but these are not quiet poems.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781625345103
Publisher:	University of Massachusetts Press
Publication date:	04/24/2020
Series:	Juniper Prize for Poetry
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	72
Sales rank:	1,176,838
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.40(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

SUSAN LESLIE MOORE is a Portland-based poet and the director of programs for writers at Literary Arts. Moore's work has appeared in such outlets as Poetry Northwest, Willow Springs, New York Quarterly, and Quick Fiction, and she is coeditor of Alive at the Center: Contemporary Poems from the Pacific Northwest.

Table of Contents

I Beginning 3

Inside our house is another house 4

I wanted to lie down with you where the rooftops 5

No One Knows Her 6

Suburb 7

To Take 9

She preferred to read the knives 10

From the Start 11

I say to the stars get inside me 12

I have tried hard to have appropriate feelings 13

II Diary from the Red House 17

Why Is Poetry Written in Lines 28

From the Naturalist's Notebook: Division 29

Bats 30

Self-Portrait as Math 32

III Her Unpublished Notebooks 35

From the Naturalist's Notebook: Propagation 38

Every Day Is a New Day 39

The Fuchsia, the Orange, and the Dahlias 40

Maria 41

Hedges 42

Prayer 43

I dreamt I was your cat and then the night 44

Eat or Be Eaten 45

Horizon means a line where the body 46

To Define: Fetch 47

It's Me 48

For the Newly Cinematic 49

Cleaning House While Listening to a Tape of Anne Sexton 50

Down at the Heels in the Ditch 51

I am climbing into bed with a stiff drink 52

IV [O my mechanical heart] 55

[My mouth is the freshest vegetable] 56

[Which crow would you give up] 57

[To say the sky was mine] 58

[If the dirt didn't love the trees] 59

Eve 60

Prayer 61

Owl among the Ruins 62

Sonnet 63

Landscape without Figures 64

Sight Comes to Owls Slowly 65

Still Life, with Brick 66

Once 67

Change the house I used to live in, its doors and windows 68

Telescope versus Microscope 69

(Surrender) 70

Notes 71

Acknowledgments 73

What People are Saying About This

Dara Wier

Moore is unafraid of rhyme's song, of poetry's brazen scales, of wanting to leave her life in order to see more, more widely. She wants to hover above; she practices a deadpan forthrightness and a prayerlike incantation. This is a wondrous book that leaves us understanding we must continue where it begins.

Diane Seuss

From its beginning, I was compelled by That Place Where You Opened Your Hands' intriguing intersections, its unpretentious surrealism, lonely wit, plainspoken musicality, and improvisational formalism. I am charmed by this speaker, this 'animal inside a ghost of those who came before me,' who takes us with her as she reaches over the threshold of the self's interiority into a numinous natural world.

Editorial Reviews

"From its beginning, I was compelled by That Place Where You Opened Your Hands' intriguing intersections, its unpretentious surrealism, lonely wit, plainspoken musicality, and improvisational formalism. I am charmed by this speaker, this 'animal inside a ghost of those who came before me,' who takes us with her as she reaches over the threshold of the self's interiority into a numinous natural world."—Diane Seuss, author of Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl: Poems

"Moore is unafraid of rhyme's song, of poetry's brazen scales, of wanting to leave her life in order to see more, more widely. She wants to hover above; she practices a deadpan forthrightness and a prayerlike incantation. This is a wondrous book that leaves us understanding we must continue where it begins."—Dara Wier, Juniper Prize for Poetry judge and author of You Good Thing

"That Place Where You Opened Your Hands is a debut poetry collection that deftly balances emotion, observation and declaration, filled with surprising and yet entirely understood lines."—Kenyon Review

From the Publisher

That Place Where You Opened Your Hands is a debut poetry collection that deftly balances emotion, observation and declaration, filled with surprising and yet entirely understood lines.

Kenyon Review