Making a Living

Praise for Making a Living “What else might ‘late capitalism’ refer to? these poems make me wonder. Could it mean capitalism carries the seed of some providential rebirth, or that it’s stuck in traffic on the interstate? Candid and intimate as the secret language of our search histories, and with an imagination that makes majesty of ‘the small architecture / in the dishwasher [we] attend to,’ the poems in Rosalie Moffett’s luminous new collection, Making a Living, electrify our most mundane reflections with a joy that ‘seems always to fashion another longing.’ Hold your ear to these poems to hear their iambic brain-beat; feel the kick of a future no algorithm could fathom.”—Gregory Pardlo, author of Spectral Evidence “Rosalie Moffett's poems, lucid and multi-textured, progress with a slyness that is also deeply sad. ‘Everyone is still alive,’ one poem informs us, and then qualifies it: ‘Everyone, within reason.’ Making a Living astutely explicates crisis—economic, bodily—and interrogates the contemporary moment with sharpness of metaphor and keenness of observation. These are poems—generative, alert, and complex—that make good on the promise of the book's smart and fitting title.” —Natalie Shapero, author of Popular Longing “Rosalie Moffett’s poetry has always concerned itself with ‘systems,’ the forces by which seemingly disparate elements interconnect, move, depend upon, and change one another in inextricable ways—in bodies, in families, in culture, in the natural world. Making a Living explores, with Moffett’s exquisite, perspicacious attentiveness and pop-cultural savvy, the ways in which even one of the most intimate human experiences—a rocky path to conceiving a child—is inseparable from the economies of consumerism, debt, marketing, and invisible sources of power. Language, finally, is what binds the speaker’s 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.”—Publisher’s 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 being—through this book we are again whole with the world.”—Fady Joudah, author of […] “To see a spider bring forth—from the manifold mysteries of her interior—a 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 admiration—for the fusion of instinct and intellect, of art and necessity. Rosalie Moffett’s 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 Moffett’s 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