Poetry

Making a Living

Poems
By
Rosalie Moffett
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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.
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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.

ISBN
9781571315656
Publish Date
Pages
96
Dimensions
8.5 × 5.5 × 0.25 in
Weight
6 oz
Cover Art
Author

Rosalie Moffett

Rosalie Moffett is the author of Nervous System, which won the National Poetry Series Prize and was listed by the New York Times as a New and Notable book, and June in Eden.

Praise and Prizes

  • “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

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