June in Eden

<div> <p><b>A sharp darkly funny and tender debut that exposes the fractures in our language our technologies and our attempts to call the world by its right name.</b><br> <br> In <i>June in Eden</i> Rosalie Ruth Moffett leads us through terrains that shift between the mythic and the modern. Sometimes the garden is wild and blooming; other times the coveted tree is only hiding a cell tower lungs become ATMs and prayers travel by text message. This is a book for an age when new kinds of war...keep / changing the maps and when even small slips-<i>preying</i> or <i>praying</i>-reveal the instability of the words we rely on.<br> <br> At the heart of the collection lies an obsession with language: its power its failures and what remains when it falters. Ruth our speaker notes is a kind of compassion / nobody wants anymore-the surviving half / of the pair of words is ruthless. Throughout these poems dark humor coexists with deep tenderness reminding us of the human urge to love the world / we made and all its shadows.<br> <br> Moffett offers a speaker bewildered and awestruck by the world's contradictions-its technological miracles its medical uncertainties its imaginative leaps. These poems equal parts grief and wonder give us a landscape that from some angles resembles paradise and from others something far stranger.</p> </div>