Laura Moriarty's Self-Destruction

I picked up Laura Moriarty’s book Self-Destruction at my local library and while I find the poems just slightly beyond my reach I thought they were enjoyable to read. This collection was published by The Post Apollo Press in 2004. There are several poems I enjoyed and I will share some of them with you:

“A Letter” is a poem that reminds me of the way I feel when reading Emily Dickinson. I often think “it makes sense but it doesn’t.” There are beautiful lines and an interesting way of making her point while also begging you to look a little deeper. In this poem, the lines “Life not releasing (unfolding)/Me letting go/The world not escaping (me)/The street this one long” is an example of what I mean. I can imagine the world turning and spinning out our lives into the street but I also wonder if that’s what she originally meant to say or if there is more to it. I am also infatuated with these lines: “Thirst/But soaked in/Not rain but sky/Blue, I don’t resist.” I cannot begin to interpret these lines into what she is trying to say but I think of it as feeling a sense of longing when looking up into the sky, thirsting for an answer to a question beginning to form in the mind. If you pick up this book and have a better sense of the poem I am eager to hear about it. I love the poem but as I said in the beginning I feel as if the poem is just slightly out of my reach.

A prose poem I enjoy is titled “For the Birds.” The beginning lines are simple and rhyme without being cliché: “I concentrate on the radio in the afternoon during pain./During rain.” The lines are something that could be easily said in a conversation and the conversation continues: “The machine breaks open to reveal our conversation./Call letters./Graphic love.” I like the clever idea of the radio being able to project literal objects such as letters and graphics. The ending line is unexpected but if I shared it with you it wouldn’t make sense at all to the beginning lines. I feel as though Laura Moriarty is describing a personal conversation that she is being reminded of while listening to the radio. You’ll have to pick up this book for yourself and find out. I don’t typically enjoy prose poems but I very much enjoyed this one.

There are other poems I enjoy but these are the two I enjoyed most out of all. I hope you’ll stumble across her work and she does have other collections out there such as Nude Memoir by Krupskaya Press in 2000 and Cunning, published by Spuyten Duyvil in 1999. She has had collections published since 1980 and I hope she continues producing more.

Thank you always for reading, please drop in tomorrow for more Poems Found by Poet Hound…