The Blog

If Jennifer Moxley is the speaker of the poems in her new collection The Open Secret (Flood Editions, 2014), she is a number of people. If she is “the poet” and also the “I” of the poems, and I, as the reader, am the “you,” because the “I” is also sometimes the “you,” we might be each other. Personhood is fluid, as she writes in “Evacuations”: 

                                             …The poet starts
counting in order to show the “active” reader
that counting is intentional and structure meaningful,
and both are true. Repetition is also a convenient device.
If I just repeat things, people will take note. If I think
about the past my life will seem to have a kind of
structure. But sometimes you need a new recipe.  

Best Bones, Sarah Rose Nordgren’s first book of poems, won the 2013 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize and was released from the University of Pittsburgh Press Pitt Poetry Series last year. Nordgren’s debut collection displays a Greek chorus of voices, ranging from the quiet tones of small children and ghosts to the sly or bitter tales of adults: wives, mistresses, slaves, and shepherds. “Stillbirth,” the poem that opens the first section of the book, warns the reader, “If you learn anything / from living in this house, it will be how / to survive a variety of interruptions.”