ABOUT THIS BOOK

Celebrating the tension between what we imagine and what we know the world to be, Susan Leslie Moore's debut collection moves between certainty and doubt, dead seriousness and determined playfulness. Exploring identity and the exterior and interior selves we create through the natural world, language, and relationships, the poems of That Place Where You Opened Your Hands bring the ordinary rhythms of life and motherhood into coexistence with wilder truths. As Moore writes, "If I can't be singular / in purpose, let me be quietly adrift," but these are not quiet poems.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

SUSAN LESLIE MOORE is a Portland-based poet and the director of programs for writers at Literary Arts. Moore's work has appeared in such outlets as Poetry Northwest, Willow Springs, New York Quarterly, and Quick Fiction, and she is coeditor of Alive at the Center: Contemporary Poems from the Pacific Northwest.

REVIEWS

"From its beginning, I was compelled by That Place Where You Opened Your Hands' intriguing intersections, its unpretentious surrealism, lonely wit, plainspoken musicality, and improvisational formalism. I am charmed by this speaker, this 'animal inside a ghost of those who came before me,' who takes us with her as she reaches over the threshold of the self's interiority into a numinous natural world."—Diane Seuss, author of Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl: Poems

"Moore is unafraid of rhyme's song, of poetry's brazen scales, of wanting to leave her life in order to see more, more widely. She wants to hover above; she practices a deadpan forthrightness and a prayerlike incantation. This is a wondrous book that leaves us understanding we must continue where it begins."—Dara Wier, Juniper Prize for Poetry judge and author of You Good Thing

"That Place Where You Opened Your Hands is a debut poetry collection that deftly balances emotion, observation and declaration, filled with surprising and yet entirely understood lines."—Kenyon Review

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Contents

Part I

Beginning

Inside Our House is Another House

I Wanted to Lie Down with you where the Rooftops

No One Knows Her

Suburb

To Take

She Preferred to Read the Knives

From the Start

I Say to the Stars Get Inside Me

I Have Tried Hard to Have Appropriate Feelings

Part II

Diary from the Red House

Why is Poetry Written in Lines

From the Naturalist’s Notebook: Division

Bats

Self-Portrait as Math

Part III

Her Unpublished Notebooks

From the Naturalist’s Notebook: Propagation

Every Day is a New Day

The Fuchsia, the Orange, and the Dahlias

Maria

Hedges

Prayer

I Dreamt I was Your Cat and then the Night

Eat or Be Eaten

Horizon Means a Line Where the Body

To Define: Fetch

It’s Me

For the Newly Cinematic

Cleaning House While Listening to a Tape of Anne Sexton

Down at the Heels in the Ditch

I am Climbing Into Bed with a Stiff Drink

Part IV

[O My Mechanical Heart]

[My Mouth is the Freshest Vegetable]

[Which Crow Would you Give up]

[To Say the Sky was Mine]

[If the Dirt didn’t Love the Trees]

Eve

Prayer

Owl Among the Ruins

Sonnet

Landscape without Figures

Sight Comes to Owls Slowly

Still Life, with Brick

Once

Change the House I used to Live in, its Doors and Windows

Telescope Versus Microscope

(Surrender)

Notes

Acknowledgments

Back Cover

AWARDS

Juniper Prize in Poetry, 2019