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A sharp, darkly funny, and tender debut that exposes the fractures in our language, our technologies, and our attempts to call the world by its right name.

In June in Eden, Rosalie Ruth Moffett leads us through terrains that shift between the mythic and the modern. Sometimes the garden is wild and blooming; other times, the coveted tree is only hiding a cell tower, lungs become ATMs, and prayers travel by text message. This is a book for an age when “new kinds of war…keep / changing the maps,” and when even small slips—preying or praying—reveal the instability of the words we rely on.

At the heart of the collection lies an obsession with language: its power, its failures, and what remains when it falters. “Ruth,” our speaker notes, is “a kind of compassion / nobody wants anymore—the surviving half / of the pair of words is ruthless.” Throughout these poems, dark humor coexists with deep tenderness, reminding us of the human urge to “love the world / we made and all its shadows.

Moffett offers a speaker bewildered and awestruck by the world’s contradictions—its technological miracles, its medical uncertainties, its imaginative leaps. These poems, equal parts grief and wonder, give us a landscape that from some angles resembles paradise, and from others, something far stranger.

The Fleeting Moment When the Confederate States of America Had the Best Opportunity to Achieve Independence and Why Their Efforts Failed
The first six months of 1862 provided a string of Federal victories in the West at Mill Springs, Fort Donelson, Pea Ridge, Island Number 10, and Shiloh. In May, New Orleans fell, and Union General George McClellan’s army was so close to the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, that the troops could set their watches by the city’s church bells. But then the unexpected happened. In June, Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia pushed McClellan’s much larger army back to the James River. In Europe, Confederate diplomats sought international recognition for the Confederate States of America, which was made even more attractive now that a shortage of cotton made the powerful textile interests anxious to end the war. Further tipping the balance, in July, the Confederacy secretly ordered two of the latest ironclad ships from England’s famous Laird Shipyard—the same yard that built the commerce raider Alabama. These steam-powered ironclads would be far superior to anything in the Federal navy.
While the “high tide” of the Confederacy is often identifed as Pickett’s Charge during the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863, the most opportune time for the Confederacy vanished seven months earlier, coinciding with President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863 and the failure of the secessionist states to be recognized as a sovereign nation. As Philip Leigh explains in his engrossing new book, The Confederacy at Flood Tide: The Political and Military Ascension, June to December 1862, on every battlefront and in the governmental halls of Europe, the Confederate effort reached its furthest extent during the second half of 1862. But with the president’s proclamation, battlefield reverses, Europe's decision to reject Confederate diplomatic overtures, and Britian's decision to halt the sale of the ironclads, the opportunity for Confederate success ended. The Confederacy would recede, and the great battles of 1863 and 1864 only marked the Southerners’ tenacity and stubborn belief in a lost cause.