Which Walks

“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.”

“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.”