June in Eden

by Rosalie Moffett

Sometimes June in Eden occupies a garden in a wild landscape. Other times, we’re given a terrain where the coveted tree is one that hides a cell tower, where lungs are likened to ATMs and prayers are sent via text message. Rosalie Ruth Moffett’s debut collection of poetry, June in Eden, questions the human task of naming in a time where there are “new kinds of war that keep / changing the maps,” where little mistakes—preying or praying, for instance—are easily made. The heart of this book is an obsession with language, its slippages and power, what to do when faced with the loss of it. “Ruth,” says our speaker, is “a kind of compassion / nobody wants anymore—the surviving half / of the pair of words is ruthless.” There is, throughout this collection, a dark humor, but one that belies a tenderness or wonder, our human need to “love the world / we made and all its shadows.”

Rosalie Moffett’s June in Eden gives us a speaker bewildered by and in awe of the world: both the miracles and failures of technology, medicine, and imagination. These darkly humorous poems are works of grief and wonder and give us a landscape that looks, from some angles, like paradise.

Genres: Poetry

53 pages, Paperback

About the author

Rosalie Moffett is the author of June in Eden, winner of the Ohio State University Press/The Journal prize. She has been awarded the "Discovery"/Boston Review prize, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing from Stanford University, and scholarships from the Tin House and Bread Loaf writing workshops. Her poems and essays have appeared in Tin House, The Believer, FIELD, Narrative, Kenyon Review, Agni, Ploughshares, and other magazines, as well as in the anthology “Gathered: Contemporary Quaker Poets.” She lives in Athens, GA where she teaches and manages the Avid Poetry Series.

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a great find, a serendipity discovery on the shelves of a library. Rosalie Moffett is a young poet who grew up in Washington state and is now based in Georgia.

She has a real gift of language, exploration, and a way of unveiling the world without losing her sense of mystery. Several of the poems in this volume are about her mother, who apparently suffered a stroke and became aphasic. Others deal with the fact that she had a twin in the womb that was absorbed into her body (which always makes me think of Andrea Martin in My Big Fat Greek Wedding).

This is a poet worth spreading the word on.

Here's just one example:

Radiograph

Forget atoms
and their empty rooms.
Forget what we thought we knew

about space and the Double Dutch
of the genome. I know. Built like an ornament,
here is my body, the receipt:

an expensive x-ray. I cracked
open my fortune cookie, a brown delicate
pelvis, and the message

was generic: Luck & Patience.
I hadn't wanted to look
into the windows

of my own house,
but there it was, my bowl
of bone glowed and glowed.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Formally, more could be going on in these couplets, triads and quatrains but that in her free verse Moffett would tease out her often extraordinary tropes, full of tonal movement though rarely so in love with the world that they want the representation of it (in an image) to stay said. A book about an aphasiac mother, rural small husbandry, and the twinnings of those, and of what, we remember we resemble.

[Sharon Purucker · Rating 5 out of 5]

June in Eden is a beautiful work of poetry. I think my favorite poem is "Fill in the Blank." It begins with:
"Is warehouse to
house as werewolf is to wolf? Am I in a pack, now
what with the dark, what with that bellyish"
The entire collection uses language in a very interesting and creative way.

[Timbo · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's been some time since I read a collection in which every poem is a gem.

[Jessica Furtado · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars

looking forward to more from this poet! Her collection, Nervous System is a recent favorite.