Product Description
by Matthew Moore (Author)
The collection of poems in The Reckoning of Jeanne d'Antietam circles the U.S. Civil War and the failed revolution of Reconstruction, and Matthew Moore makes incursions into the histories and beliefs of the era through architectures of sound, but also via ancillary histories and histories stacked upon histories--densely and visibly scrawled--like Anselm Kiefer's sculptures of lead books, melted and dripping with the texts of illegible songs. His poems include the figure of Joan of Arc (Jeanne d'Arc) and her voices; the explosion of the U.S. prison system and racial legal fictions amid the groundswell of mass terror in the wake of the U.S. Civil War; the politically poisoned poetic lineage that moves from Modernism, to New Criticism, and dead-ends in Southern Agrarianism; and the destructive colonial histories of the sugar and cotton industries.
The Reckoning of Jeanne d'Antietam stands imbricated with the spell of language-the-testament; language as hard rhyme and difficult music, evanescence and violence; and the invocation of names and events at their meeting places in history. Moore's poems stand against sentiment and pity, and against the consolation of that which cannot be consoled.Author Biography
Matthew Moore's poetry has appeared in The Carolina Quarterly, Interim, KROnline, Lana Turner, Prelude, Second Stutter, and West Branch. He is the translator of Opera Buffa by Tomaz Salamun. Moore has also translated a chapbook, Padova by Igo Gruden. He received a BA from Kenyon College and an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. This is his first collection.
