Moschovakis’s playfully grim debut, a gathering of smart, sometimes puzzling poetic sequences, swears allegiance to fragments, open-ended inquiries, sudden juxtapositions and projects linked to analytic philosophy. The first sequence, “Thought Experiment,” consists of slightly flirtatious short blocks of prose: “With progress, not only earthquakes but kisses will be predicted.” Her last two, “Winter Songs” and the excellent “The Dead Man Looks into His Own Dead Ear,” explore self-alienation and mourning in quirky, curt lines, distorting grammar as she goes: “Coiling around a stone/ in the posture of sleep/ I is getting wakier.” Of the four sequences in between, the strongest, “The Blue Book,” piles up single-line sentences as it vamps on queries from Ludwig Wittgenstein: “A language changes in appearances as I learn to decipher its characters.” Moschovakis, an editor at Ugly Duckling Presse, has crafted a mix of sparkling moments and baffling structures; her first sortie of philosophical investigations promises much more to come. —Publishers Weekly
Finalist, Norma Farber First Book Award (Poetry Society of America)
“An auspicious debut… Stripped of artifice and the mere effects of formal pyrotechnics, these poems move by ear and intellect, pushing and pulling at the real with precision and mystery.”—Ammiel Alcalay
“A trailblazing work.” —Lewis Warsh
“In Anna Moschovakis’s marvelous first book, poetry reinvents itself in Plato’s cave, where nothing can be seen but the mind’s agile resources climbing the walls of our real, present world. Perplexed at the moment of certainty, estranged at the moment of intimacy, [these] poems … illuminate, amuse, and provoke. Plato would have loved them.” —Ann Lauterbach