Dear If

by Mary B. Moore

Grounded in nature and the body’s knowledge of death, Mary B. Moore’s fifth poetry collection queries the divine, evoking its traces in doubt, dread, and awe; in language’s music and its ability to make be; in earth’s prismatic effulgence and its cataclysm and charism. Inventive in image, metaphor, and wordplay, Moore mourns belief and its loss. Moore's poems are influenced by Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore in their keen eye toward the natural world, and by John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Mary Szybist in their ardor to stretch language to address the sacred.

119 pages, Paperback

Published April 5, 2022

About the author

Mary B. Moore’s five poetry books include Dear If, (Orison Books, April 2022); Flicker (Dogfish Head Book Prize, 2016); and The Book Of Snow (Cleveland State UP, 1997), and the chapbooks are Amanda and the Man Soul (Emrys Prize, 2017) and Eating the Light (Sable Books Contest 2016). Her poetry has won awards from NELLE, Terrain, Asheville Poetry Review and Nimrod. Poems appeared lately in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Gettysburg Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, The Nasty Women Poets Anthology, and Fire & Rain, Eco-Poetry of California. She also wrote a critical study of women sonneteers and Petrarch, Desiring Voices, Women Sonneteers and Petrarchism, SIU Press, 2000. She lives in Huntington WV where she retired from Marshall University and has one daughter, an attorney in Northern California, Moore’s home place.