About this item
Highlights
- A series of poems that explores walking, writing, and making as divinatory practices.Documenting (and interrogating) the poet's daily walks, Which Walks investigates the twin practices of walking and art-making while aging.
- About the Author: Laura Moriarty grew up in Cape Cod and northern California.
- Poetry, Women Authors
Description
Book Synopsis
A series of poems that explores walking, writing, and making as divinatory practices.Documenting (and interrogating) the poet's daily walks, Which Walks investigates the twin practices of walking and art-making while aging. Gender is also a central concern in this intensely feminist work. Moriarty's book relates to the endlessly unfinished journeys of Nathaniel Mackey's long poems, as well as to the dailiness of many writers from Charles Baudelaire to Robert Creeley. These poems are an extension of the author's visual practice, which she is returning to after a fifty-year break. Here she succeeds in existing--even thriving--in today's strange, often terrifying, world.
Review Quotes
"We age as we see; we see in our aging all we have done--all we have made, all we have read, everyone we have known--and it's this seeing that moves us in and through and out beyond the world. Laura Moriarty's Which Walks proves it. This is a profound and intimate study of being with at a crucial time where many feel without. A book (and a way to love) that we need." --Renee Gladman
"In Which Walks, Laura Moriarty turns her expansive curiosity and attentive intelligence towards a world beset by plague and precarity, transforming "what almost doesn't exist//yet persists" and "clearing what has died into//what is born by the poem of the mind." Moriarty is our intrepid "archeologist of the present" offering this long poem of expansive love to attune our walking, making, and remembering." --Alli Warren
"In this ambitious sequence written during the pandemic, Laura Moriarty embraces the dislocation such an event forces. Thrown free of 'epistemic framework, ' she sees herself as if from the outside, an "old woman" gathering debris from which to make art. To find oneself 'old' in the midst of a shocking global disaster is a double displacement. Moriarty confronts this situation with a clear-eyed detachment not unlike a state of shock. 'Where we stand//mindfully outside the universe of words/...suspended in the phantom of equilibrium, '--and now aware that the stability we once assumed is an illusion. From this strange position (or perhaps superposition) inside and outside the sayable, Moriary makes language sing." --Rae Armantrout
"Laura Moriarty has unique wit and humor--and perhaps the most perceptive engagement with words anyone's had for years. They are her pleasure, her resource, her wisdom and company, and she shares them with generous abandon. Here one may finally see that what's said makes a world endlessly, over and over and over. Hers is an abiding delight."
--Robert Creeley
About the Author
Laura Moriarty grew up in Cape Cod and northern California. She studied at Sacramento State University and the University of California at Berkeley. She is the author of numerous collections of poetry and two novels. Moriarty served as archive director for the Poetry Center and American Poetry Archives at San Francisco State University. She has taught at Naropa University, the Otis Art Institute, and Mills College. Her honors include a Poetry Center Book Award, a Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Award in Poetry, a New Langton Arts Award, and a Fund for Poetry grant. She lives in Northern California.