Making a Living: Poems

(Paperback)

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A brilliant and lithe collection of poems making space for the resolve and hope of motherhood amid consumerist dreams and nightmares.

Consumerism-its privations and raptures-seeps into all aspects of contemporary life. "Who knows me / as the search bar does, which holds / sacred its grasp of me / as a creature of habit" probes Rosalie Moffett, reckoning with algorithms, with marketing and capital. But Making a Living isn't just about the trappings of materialism-it's also about the fraught trials of trying to bring forth life in a double-dealing America where all sources are suspect.

Shrewdly balancing the likes of Scrooge McDuck and HGTV, ancient Roman haruspicy and the latest pregnancy technologies, this collection arcs ultimately toward reinhabiting the present, refusing to look away-on seeing as a method of prayer and a power against capitalism's threats to love, motherhood, reverence, and nature. Vigilant and profane, gentle and generous, full of desire and cunning, Moffett's poetry is a singular entry in our conversations around enduring modern life and daring to make new life in the process.

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Praise forMaking a Living

Rosalie Moffetts poetry has always concerned itself with systems, the forces by which seemingly disparate elements interconnect, move, depend upon, and change one another in inextricable waysin bodies, in families, in culture, in the natural world. Making a Living explores, with Moffetts exquisite, perspicacious attentiveness and pop-cultural savvy, the ways in which even one of the most intimate human experiencesa rocky path to conceiving a childis inseparable from the economies of consumerism, debt, marketing, and invisible sources of power. Language, finally, is what binds the speakers travail and joy in the midst of larger, entangling systems (the mort in mortgage, for example, or the exorbitant cost of a Tylenol in the birthing clinic). Moffett offers up her little towers / of words as a kind of talismanic orison despite her lack of naivete. [T]oo late, she writes in Word, I recalled, I do not pray.Lisa Russ Spaar, author of Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems

Praise for Nervous System

Moffett creates order out of the chaos in this radiant collection, cataloging the known and unknown into a coherent story for both the reader and herself.Publishers Weekly

A spider, a snail, a biologist mother, and her daughter walk into a poem. The mother suffers a brain injury in which language goes missing. The daughter spins metaphors into allegories (drawn from the entomological and etymological alike) to release memory into the tongue her mother taught her to live by: I wasn't allowed to retain a childish lexicon. Epistemology dances with ontology. Pleasure, beauty, and the unassailable who am I transform this astonishing elegy into a symphony played on silky strings: the past is what gets flooded from you / when blood comes / between the spider mother and the mother // that lasts. A book of heartbreaking delight and enthralling consciousness, Nervous System is an aesthetic rarity that places natural science at the service of beingthrough this book we are again whole with the world.Fady Joudah, author of []

To see a spider bring forthfrom the manifold mysteries of her interiora single tensile strand is a minor miracle. To see her weave these strands into a geometry as functional as it is elegant is to feel another level of admirationfor the fusion of instinct and intellect, of art and necessity. Rosalie Moffetts poems share this visceral tug and this dexterous virtuosity[w]hatever the world offers in the way / of sustenance snares // in those careful lines. She links together family and injury and biology and geography and destiny and dailiness into a causal geometry of breakages as heartbreaking as it is exquisite.Monica Youn, author of From From

Rosalie Moffetts Nervous System is a pellucid, intricate beautiful book-length meditation on the contingencies of human attachment. A masterful and luminous book.Alan Shapiro, author of Proceed to Check Out

Author Bio

Rosalie Moffettis the author ofNervous System, which won the National Poetry Series Prize and was listed by theNew York Timesas a New and Notable book, and June in Eden. She has been awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and her work has appeared in theAmerican Poetry Review, POETRY Magazine, New England Review, Kenyon Review, andPloughshares. She lives in Evansville, Indiana, where she is an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern Indiana and the senior poetry editor for the Southern Indiana Review.