Making a Living: Poems

＂These are poems--generative, alert, and complex--that make good on the promise of the book’s smart and fitting title.＂ --Natalie Shapero, author of Popular Longing

A brilliant and lithe collection of poems making space for the resolve and hope of motherhood amid consumerist dreams and nightmares.

Consumerism--its privations and raptures--seeps into all aspects of contemporary life. ＂Who knows me / as the search bar does, which holds / sacred its grasp of me / as a creature of habit?＂ probes Rosalie Moffett, reckoning with algorithms, with marketing and capital. But Making a Living isn’t just about the trappings of materialism--it’s also about the fraught trials of trying to bring forth life in a double-dealing America where all sources are suspect.

Shrewdly balancing the likes of Scrooge McDuck and HGTV, ancient Roman haruspicy and the latest pregnancy technologies, this collection arcs ultimately toward reinhabiting the present, refusing to look away--on seeing as a method of prayer and a power against capitalism’s threats to love, motherhood, reverence, and nature. Vigilant and profane, gentle and generous, full of desire and cunning, Moffett’s poetry is a singular entry in our conversations around enduring modern life and daring to make new life in the process.

Rosalie Moffett is the author of Nervous System, which won the National Poetry Series Prize and was listed by the New York Times as a New and Notable book, and June in Eden. She has been awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and her work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, POETRY Magazine, New England Review, Kenyon Review, and Ploughshares. She lives in Evansville, Indiana, where she is an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern Indiana and the senior poetry editor for the Southern Indiana Review.