Description
In Easy Does It, Jennifer Moore’s second full-length collection, the speaker brings the reader on an exploration of multiple worlds: the social, the domestic, and the pastoral, considering the difficult questions and problems of the self—of memory, history, grief, and desire. The poems move from buzzing, bewildering environments where “hide and seek becomes Save yourself” and “nothing ever / does it easy” in pursuit of clarity, beauty, and stillness. With colloquial humor and curiosity, the speaker investigates her subjects in tones that range from the wry to the resigned to the powerful. Through linguistic echo and metaphorical transformation, the familiar is made strange and the strange feels like home.
About the Author
Jennifer Moore was born and raised in Seattle. She is the author of The Veronica Maneuver (University of Akron Press, 2015) and the chapbook Smaller Ghosts (Seven Kitchens Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, Bennington Review, Interim, The Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere, and her work has been recognized by residencies with and fellowships from the Jentel Arts Foundation, Artsmith, and the Ora Lerman Charitable Trust. An associate professor of creative writing at Ohio Northern University, she lives in Bowling Green, Ohio.
Advance Praise for Easy Does It
Jennifer Moore is a searcher for the unfound and a master of the domestic’s duplicity as her cityscapes collide with the pastoral: “the new view is the old view, revised to include a little white noise.” A rebel at heart, she is constantly escaping—like Dickinson—the inescapable house: “I made my house a house of rain; / at night, a house of snow. // I filled the bedrooms with waves. / I emptied the kitchen of fog.” Easy Does It is at once reeling with truth and paradox, —and at her best, Moore is a master of prosody, emotion, and startling imagery: “Grief against the / mourning for the / sorrow at the / hammer” —Mark Irwin
