By Susan Leslie Moore, BA '84 (english)

Celebrating the tension between what we imagine and what we know the world to be, Susan Leslie Moore’s debut collection moves between certainty and doubt, dead seriousness and determined playfulness. Exploring identity and the exterior and interior selves we create through the natural world, language, and relationships, the poems of That Place Where You Opened Your Hands bring the ordinary rhythms of life and motherhood into coexistence with wilder truths. As Moore writes, “If I can’t be singular / in purpose, let me be quietly adrift,” but these are not quiet poems.

University of Massachusetts Press, April 2020