Books
Personal Volcano
Nightboat Books, 2019
“Within these pages, the writer-volcanologist re-imagines the poetic act to highlight the intersections, not only between literary genres — travelogue, prose poem, dramatic monologue, investigative lyric, autobiography — but also between various discourses, voices, and rhetorical strategies. The upshot of such a heteroglossic, relational structure is that Volcano complicates each individual strand and doubles it with a persistent questioning of one’s own positionality.” -Chris Tysh
Verne
& Lemurian Objects
Mindmade Books, 2017
Who That Divines
Nightboat Books, 2014
“Moriarty . . . calls upon a wide range of poetic styles to explore the connection between agency and the divine in her latest collection. Opening with a Luce Irigaray epigraph—“Divinity is what we need to become free, autonomous, sovereign”—Moriarty looks at the divine broadly, considering in her poems divinity arises from sources and structures of power of all kinds, not just gods, and focusing especially on acts of divination, both in the traditional sense and in more expansive acts of discovery, seeing, and knowing.” -Publishers Weekly
A Tonalist
Nightboat Books, 2010
“Moriarty’s A Tonalist explores–in appropriately trans-generic form–the shades, timbres, and temporalities of affinity with a warmth and intelligence rarely encountered in this age of ironic overdetermination. This is, simply put, a moving and vital book.” -Stephen Cope
“Always synesthetic, always formally relentless, in A Tonalist, Moriarty manages to keep a penetrating ethical-philosophical inquiry alive within a lyric terrain.” -Cole Swensen
“Moriarty’s definitions of A Tonalist are both achingly broad and disarmingly accurate and there are few statements of what it is to be A Tonalist without immediately undercutting the assertion. One of the closest we get is also my favorite: ‘Some people write lyric poetry because they just want to and think it is great. Some write it though they think it impossible. The latter are A Tonalists.’” -The Editors, Jerry Magazine
Ladybug Laws
Slack Buddha Press, 2009
An Air Force
Hooke Press, 2007
A Semblance: Selected and New Poems (1975-2007)
Omnidawn, 2007
“For those of us who have eagerly followed Laura Moriarty’s work, this selection represents an invaluable overview of the multiple paths she has taken across the years. For those new to it, here is an opportunity to come to know a body of relentlessly exploratory writing in both verse and prose, one that constantly reexamines and reinvents genres and forms. Emanating from “one whose experience retains heat,” A Semblance determinedly probes the tensile shapes of poetic thought.” -Michael Palmer
Ultravioleta
Atelos, 2006
"ULTRAVIOLETA is in the first place a mind that is spacious, with spangled depths on the order of William Blake and Phillip K. Dick. Our Mental Travelers are shining, friendly, off-hand and amorous astronauts, humans, monsters, aliens, and constructions, and they move through the galaxy on wings of a consciousness that is more than permeable...[Moriarty] has invented a new kind of tale in which the materiality of language and the magic of story combine in ever more wondrous agreements" -Robert Glück.
“In her enchanting second novel, Moriarty (Cunning ) goes for nothing less than the nature of time, space, life and art—literally creating a fictional universe. . Sweet Borges-like thought experiments meet Philip K. Dick paranoia, with strands of science fiction, romance, pulp noir, fairy tale and the American road novel taken up by characters like Cap (a robot), beatlike figure Eddie Zed, hot muse Tinia, cute guy Dayv, blow-hard Pontius Pilate (pilot of the frighteningly huge, attention-grabbing ship Ultravioleta ) and a malevolent, unstoppable, plural group called "the I." This mission is as keenly ambitious as it is successful. . .” –Publishers Weekly
Various Presents:
The Frankenstein Franchise
with Alan Halsey
A Gargoyle Edition, 2005
Self-Destruction
The Post-Apollo Press, 2004
“Moriarty enters the third decade of her career with an exciting book that extends both the penchant for splitting, doubling and twinning seen in Symmetry (1996) and the enigmatic handling of narrative fragments first perfected in the brilliant and bewildering Nude Memoir (2001). The book's two unevenly sized sections form an asymmetrical diptych, mirroring Moriarty's densely patterned, obliquely framed glimpses of the self as it shades into and is sometimes eclipsed by the "other." . . .The much shorter second section counts among its 11 poems a 13-page meditation on "cryptophasia" (the language twins often concoct to communicate with one another) that synthesizes many of the book's most persistent themes and weaves in numerous citations from other writers (John Wilkinson, Brent Cunningham, Giorgio Agamben, Gail Scott). Starkly nonidentical, these twin sections add up to one of the best books of poems to be published so far this year. –Publishers Weekly
Nude Memoir
Krupskaya, 2000
A rehearsal in time
for the dead ones as landscape (handbook)
her book can't know how to
tell you then turns and does
a gloss on the Castle of O? blueprint for Vertigo?
pingpong of sources in vast cinematic bowl
bared body unspeakable
but never at a loss for words
the sheerest proposal there is
trying to come through these pages
- Clark Coolidge
In this Nude Memoir--a roving gallery of nude torsos, nude cadaver toes, nude female lover and dead male lover, nude bride undoing God's and Duchamp's imposed abstract nakedness--a woman is born. She is born of words formed when "a sex (is) offered to a face." She is terrible and she is wonderful. She is film noir married to Baroque. She is sentences, magnificence, lust. She is an edifice of loss materializing and dematerial-izing on a line between poetry and prose that Laura Moriarty casts with the hand of a magician. I, too, dream of stripping bare this figure that the poet has so gorgeously decked out, to get to the heart of her namelessness. Nude Memoir is an entrancing work of love, mourning, and resistance by a major poet.
- Gail Scott
Cunning
Spuyten Duyvil, 1999
Cunning is the story of various impossible women -- Elizabeth I, Mary of Scotland, the 19th century courtesan Lola Montez, Sarah Winchester and Sarah Winnemucca, the men they use and are used by, and the fabled lands they covet and colonize, California and Ireland (Kevin Killian). These are cunning women; this is cunning writing: 'She is a low cunning witch, ' he claimed, which, not knowing what he meant, made her believe that cunning was the word for what she did for what she had done. For what she was. Written in short chapters and gorgeous, propelled sentences, poet Laura Moriarty's novelistic foray into history, geography, the female, asks to be read in one delicious sitting. In the geography of the masque, everything is exposed. There is a handwritten quality to the age which is also true of the play. Our attendance is mandatory in the sense that we will not feel part of life if we are left out. The absent ones are remembered and then not (from The Masque of 'The World').
- Goodreads
The Case
O Books, 1998
"The Case, besides being a mystery to be solved (where is the dead beloved, what happened to him?) and a literal case or box containing items (as with Duchamp's Boxes) pertinent to the larger work (the 'wedding'; or past and present lives) also strikes the reader as a private enclosure in which the poet confronts herself and what has happened. This space is sometimes theatrical or artifact-like, sometimes inclusive of the natural world; real objects and present experience can take part in the confrontation. Experience is encountered not described, the present is what it's like when it's happening even if it's pain. Though The Case is a private domain it isn't exclusive: the poet is alone thinking, yet others feel nearby in their warmth. The Case is appropriately muted, but not reticent. Its colors seem wisely chosen. It's full of light, ocean light, house light, the light of a shadow puppet show. The subject of the book isn't at all darkness, it's the peculiarly lit and peculiarly gracious space in which rituals of loss take place." - Alice Notley
"The Case is a master work. Deceptively quiet and contemplative in its tone, The Case is searing lush, austere, tender, loving and terrifying not by turns, but at once, all the way through and all the time. Laura Moriarty has for years been one of our finest poets and now she takes us to a new level. In the deepest recesses of the real, it's impossible to escape life itself as it faces absolute limits.” - Ron Silliman
Spicer’s City
Poetry New York, 1998
Spicer’s City is 6 prose-poems which have to do with men, names, war, the city, films, relations, ends, lacks of end, means and meanings. The drama of recognition is a story without names. The double, the ambivalent, the uncertain, these are the categories we must accept. Only something like a mineral garden is left. Only something like poems, nourishment in paragraphs, names of musings and experiences, experiments, attempts, which ask us to consider: “What have I said? What have I done? In a story about memory do the memories make any difference?” (from “12 O'clock High”)
Symmetry
Avec Books, 1996
“The surfaces of these poems shiver with a tensile strength. Although the language is simple and the topics vaguely commonplace (in the manner of Francis Ponge or Pierre Reverdy), Moriarty, here in her fourth book, manages to array across a single plane a poetry of sublime beauty, bewitching and strange. She invokes Marcel Duchamp's definition of symmetry to explain the book's title, and more than once the reader will be reminded of the artist's works on glass: "Painted sky/ Glass with vines wound/ Hell or heaven also painted/ Or silver lemon peeled." Although occasionally Moriarty stumbles into false profundities, her otherwise steadfast adherence to a quiet language builds a fine case for how complexities can be found in the simplest of arrangements. And the book's brilliant closing statement, "Diagram," tells exactly whereof this poetry is born: "inside all of one part/ Of one day going on . . . ." - Publishers Weekly
L’Archiviste
Zasterle Press, 1991
“The reader feels the same as the archivist. Information is as numerous as stars. It gets out of hand. Your only consolation is that you are going in the same direction it is. There is no completion possible. There is only the need to be alert, an exhausting state of readiness. The stops occur when sequences cross. They become congruent with the desires or conclusions of the customer, patron or reader. This is an actual description of the experience. You could tell it differently.”
Rondeaux
Roof Books, 1990
"Laura Moriarty's Rondeaux is a beautiful and complex collection of writings. They seem to emerge out of one or many situations, but as if they were locations in a person's life. These situations were once narrative or are about to be so, but because of the erotic and pensive writing, the events, or the moments in which they occur, have stopped. But consideration and implication continue, a real recollection of writings. This wonderful book suggests that not all experience must disperse."
- Lyn Hejinian
"In Rondeaux Laura Moriarty expands the scope of her poetry. I'm especially impressed by her ability to write thoroughly contemporary disjunctive-conjunctive poems that obliquely echo traditional personal lyrics and other verse forms, notably, the eponymous 'rondeaux,' whose endings recall their beginnings without repeating them, and the 'baroque' poems."
- Jackson Mac Low
like roads
Kelsey Street Press, 1990
"Read these roads. Never will it be more apparent that space not time makes value. Passing glances amount to the whole story - that is, women, not judges. The measures are the airs; they build a city of music."
- Fanny Howe
Duse
Coincidence Press, 1987
Paradigm Press, 2000 (reprint)
Life on a Red Field
Jimmy & Lucy’s House of “K”, 1985
Persia
Chance Additions, 1983
2 cross seizings
Sombre Reptiles, 1980
Escape from Veils
Sternum Press, 1976