“Entirely and completely loved this chapbook by Lori Anderson Moseman with above/ground press @robmclennanblog ! There's a calm, a beauty, a harshness all at once in these poems. The two chapbooks Lori Anderson Moseman published in 2022 each explore harshness: Okay? by recognizing, staying with and responding to harshness; too many words by keeping it at bay and creating buffers and preparing balms. These are two ways of making it bearable without fleeing it, two attempts at facing it and acknowledging the inevitability of asperities, irritants, and, ultimately, some measure of harm. –Jérôme Melançon in The Ampersand Review.
Okay? This chapbook, published by above/ground press, checks in with each reader: how do you inhabit “place” in the face of death? Lyric lean into memoir to examine notions nurture and colony. These poems travel rivers (Bitteroot, Delaware) as well as cities (Canterbury, Rome) to find “the focus that balances / the body about its axis.” Offering gratitude to water, the poet hunkers down with a partner and small dog pack daily by walking a jetty constructed in a terminal basin lake.
we let routine feed us carry us forward
we limit our vocabulary to basic instruction
we read movement of each other’s bodies
we sync our breathing some call that “prayer”