Enter - by Jim Moore (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

In Enter, poet Jim Moore navigates the public spaces of his neighborhood--parks, boardwalks, piazzas, even parking garages--and encounters people negotiating mortality in the pandemic age just as he is coming to terms with his own long story. In his signature lucid and wry voice, Moore acknowledges suffering while making room for joy and for moments of peace. These poems offer shelter to readers and, in summoning poets like Rilke and Tsvetaeva, remind us that poetry's tenderness can be repaid in tenderness. "Please show me how to be you," he writes in deeply intimate lines revealing a poettapped into the networks of human connection vibrating under the surface of all the places humans gather.

Enter is a collection of thoughtful meditations on hope at a moment when hope seems far-fetched, when humanity is faced with the inevitability of being "grazed upon by earth." Yet Moore finds the joy, he writes of shyness and the bells of a church resounding, of counting hours: "I find words. I write of love." Enter is a collection of thoughtful meditations on hope at a moment when hope seems farfetched, when humanity is faced with the inevitability of being 'grazed upon by earth." Yet Jim Moore finds the joy, he writes of shyness and the bells of a church resounding, of counting hours: "I find words. I write of love."

Review Quotes

Praise for Prognosis

"These are poems of arresting lyric reportage; whimsical, tragic, a touch fantastical."--Daisy Fried, The New York Times Book Review

"Readers will discover that clarity and mystery are not mutually exclusive as they encounter luminous images packed with the complexity of life deeply lived."--Elizabeth Hoover, Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

Praise for Enter

"If 'the why of things' escapes you or if 'you're troubled about the great etc, ' let Jim Moore show you a way to the happiness the world can offer. 'Sometimes the world won't let itself be sung, ' he writes--but he calls out more wonder and tenderness than I could have imagined. He is Orphic. He harmonizes our common pain with the small and complicated graces of living. I am so glad to enter into these poems, into this book!"--G. E. Patterson, author of To and From

"Jim Moore's Enter reminds us that for each death we must endure there was also the life that person lived--that for each departing there was also an entering. And though death is constantly present in this book, Moore pushes back against it with a sort of shaggy refuge gathered from the minute pleasures that are often all we have, like in the devastating but wondrous sentence: 'In defense of this planet, there was a pine tree I was able to stand next to after my mother's funeral.' Even when the horrors of environmental collapse or childhood sexual trauma pull themselves to the center, Moore works his way back to beauty. This is a book stuffed with the things humans have made as antidotes to suffering, from Tsvetaeva's poems to Caveggio's paintings, Spoleto, Seward Park, skateboards. But none of that feels like overworked reverence, but rather a poet finding, sometimes painstakingly, his way to believe it when he writes, 'Say what you will, I stayed / as long as I could. I was often alone, / but not lonely. I was sad, / but not only.'"--CJ Evans, author of Lives

"A wonderfully companionable warmth and conversational ease run through the poems in Jim Moore's latest collection Enter, though any maker of poems knows how much mastery of clarity and concision goes into creating this illusion. I can't think of a poet today who kindles more resonance in thought and depth of feeling out of what (at first) seems simply fashioned. I'm especially drawn to poems that treat me like an old friend, that trust me with their intimacy and vulnerabilities, and Enter makes me feel as if I've known its speaker for many years. Moore's poems are full of dailiness, small actions, the ordinary stuff of most people's lives (streetlights, weather, stars getting on with their celestial business, the rooms where we live our lives, the loved ones lost we carry with us), and yet it all feels quite extraordinary in Jim Moore's hands. As this poet says elsewhere in his writing '...I have felt that life is much more about the interruption of plot than about the plot.' The poems in Enter show us how very true this is. And I truly love this book. Pretty sure you will too."--Erin Belieu, author of Come-Hither Honeycomb

About the Author