A Semblance, 1975-2007 Book

Drawn from 13 previous poetry collections, this selected compilation includes many poems from hard-to-find collections as well as new work from one of the most formally inventive and lyrically innovative poets writing today. Whether examining the historically gendered gaze of artistic and cultural narratives and their impact upon the individual, the symmetries that interlink to figure our social and political horizons, or the destructive forces that both expose and explode our meaning of self, these poems offer the expansive pleasure of revelation in each finely distilled articulation. This collection offers readers a range of work from the poet’s long writing career and includes an introduction by poet Norma Cole.

Publishers Weekly

The publication last year of Moriarty's novel Ultravioleta(Atelos) was greeted with such praise that its small press publisher sold out its first run. This book brings together many hard-to-find pieces from 12 collections of verse, making a writer who often works at book-length in nontraditional lyric modes seem suddenly much more immediate and accessible. Moriarty, who is the deputy director at Small Press Distribution, studied with Robert Duncan, and is closely associated with Bay Area poet Norma Cole (who provides an introduction). She has the former's baroquely elegant turns of mind and the latter's searching fluidity, but her subject matter-roughly, how one's self-perceptions form a language that one is always comparing to one's experiences-is all her own, and her lines have a tensile gorgeousness unlike anyone else's: "Love itself embodied perspective/ Flattened out into a map/ If you cause me to act." The excerpt from Moriarty's extended meditation Nude Memoir, for example, takes in everything from Duchamp to narrative theory to "[a] child with the memories of a woman." The result is a book that offers a sense of discovery, tinged at every turn with humor, "transposition problem[s]" and a "Blinding kiss." (Sept.)