Poetry
Self-Destruction
By Laura Moriarty
In the cosmology of Self-Destruction, the unified "I" breaks into a constellation of truths existing at different intervals. Using language as a medium of displacement, the poems enact the threats and possibilities of the self's desire to rhyme itself into a recognizable convention.
"My mind. Our work. The war." In Self-Destruction Laura Moriarty powerfully presents us with a mystery. An author is being pursued by her character. She sees this and she sees that. One of the two has to pay for the other. "But the world is a threat." While we hope for ambiguity-ending relations in this time of transitive, empty war nothing is ever settled.
—Susan Howe
In producing a poem the poet disappears, as with his Let there be light God put himself in the dark. Laura Moriarty is hidden in or excluded from these beautiful poems of Self-Destruction—which live their own luminous lives.
—Keith Waldrop
Although it is insulting to be "selfish" one loves the habit of saying "I..."—we have good reason to be skeptical of that habit. So while love is the first principle of Self-Destruction, Moriarty observes it in couples, couplets, and tempos that do themselves in with joy. Musically, thoughtfully, emotionally, this is a practical book. Live with it.
—Patrick Durgin
Laura Moriarty is the author of eleven books of poetry, including Nude Memoir (Krupskaya), The Case (O Books), Like Roads (Kelsey St. Press), and Persia (Chance Additions), which co-won The Poetry Center Book Award in 1983. She received a Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Award in Poetry in 1992, a residency at the Foundation Royaumont in France in 1993, and a New Langton Arts Award in Literature in 1998. From 1986-1997 she was Archives Director at the American Poetry Archives at the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University. She is now Acquisition and Marketing Director at Small Press Distribution in Berkeley, California.
2004 125 pages $14.00 ISBN 0-942996-51-8
