The Fish Has Swallowed Earth

By Annabelle Moseley

Love in all its many forms stands at the heart of Annabelle Moseley's The Fish Has Swallowed Earth. The fish of the title poem may have "a hollow mouth full of stones," but the poet certainly does not. Instead, she has "long verses falling from my hair / new sentences on my skin." "I send you notes from love's many countries," says Moseley, and she brings us to: Russia, the Czech Republic, France, Japan, Italy, Greece, and back again. "Face, streaked with pollen / skin coated with petals," "I am your evening rose- / I bloom for you," Moseley writes, in poems that are delicate love songs, paeans to the world and its perishable beauty. -Barbara Crooker If fish grew legs to leave the sea, if they "call[ed] flatly to be enfleshed," if evolution has a scale, Annabelle Moseley lyrically portrays love as its epitome, and we are all on its journey toward the awakening that shatters restraint, penetrates dreams into "a liquid fire" and "into the quiet passion/ of ... keeping." Steeped in myth and many countries, in art and all of nature, Moseley's rich and visionary imagery evoke the inchoate, ancient origins and universality of our journey. "Caught [in] the scent/ of salt and grief," sometimes "too bright to look at" and risk loss of self, love is an unconscious potential, its full realization "waiting/ in the silence" of psyche "for a little death/ a large life," as wonderfully evinced by Moseley. -Gayl Teller Annabelle Moseley has mapped out a crucial geography of love-anticipation, expectation, frustration, consideration-all the delicious motions, half-steps and pauses as person moves in the love-ward direction. She has a marvelous grasp of the tenuous flickers of substantial feeling. This book is a delight. -Baron Wormser

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0615648770
• ISBN13: 9780615648774
• Release Date: June 2012
• Publisher: Aldrich Publishing
• Length: 48 Pages
• Weight: 0.27 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.1" x 6.0"