Making a Living

“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.’”

“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.”