Go Figure

In Go Figure, Carol Moldaw demonstrates an incandescent mastery of figuration in its many forms. As the title suggests, these poems invite readers to draw their own conclusions. Observing, inquiring, and delving, Moldaw brings the intertwined strands of life and art to light at their most intimate. A wife-muse who interrogates the role, a mother hard-pressed by motherhood, a daughter whose own mother’s decline causes her to probe their connection, and an artist with an exacting eye and ear who contemplates the creative mysteries, Moldaw is driven to understand and articulate the self in all its manifestations. Like a skater cutting first lines in ice, Moldaw displays lyric immediacy and lyric expanse in her poems with an unswerving command. Complex and inviting, with deft wit, the poems engage public and private life and voice a necessary and resounding affirmation of the feminine and of language emerging through silence.

Carol Moldaw is the author of six previous books of poetry: Beauty Refracted (Four Way Books, 2018); So Late, So Soon: New and Selected Poems (Etruscan Press, 2010); The Lightning Field, 2002 winner of the FIELD Poetry Prize (Oberlin College Press, 2003); Through the Window (La Alameda Press, 2001), also translated into Turkish and published in a bilingual edition in Istanbul (Iyi Seyler, 1998); Chalkmarks on Stone (La Alameda Press, 1998); and Taken from the River (Alef Books, 1993). She is also the author of a novella, The Widening (Etruscan Press, 2008). She has received a Merwin Conservancy Artist Residency, a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship, and a Pushcart Prize. Her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared widely in such journals as The American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Yale Review, as well as many anthologies, including Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry and Contemporary Literary Criticism. Along with Turkish, her poems have been translated into Chinese, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. A volume of her selected poems, translated into Chinese, is forthcoming from Guangxi Normal University Press in Beijing in 2025. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.