Books

ENTER

Graywolf Press

May 2025

In Enter, poet Jim Moore navigates the public spaces of his neighborhood — parks, boardwalks, piazzas, even parking garages — and encounters people negotiating mortality in the pandemic age just as he is coming to terms with his own long story. In his signature lucid and wry voice, Moore acknowledges suffering while making room for joy and for moments of peace. These poems offer shelter to readers and, in summoning poets like Rilke and Tsvetaeva, remind us that poetry’s tenderness can be repaid in tenderness. “Please show me how to be you,” he writes in deeply intimate lines revealing a poettapped into the networks of human connection vibrating under the surface of all the places humans gather.
 
Enter is a collection of thoughtful meditations on hope at a moment when hope seems far-fetched, when humanity is faced with the inevitability of being “grazed upon by earth.” Yet Moore finds the joy, he writes of shyness and the bells of a church resounding, of counting hours: “I find words. I write of love.”

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PROGNOSIS
Graywolf Press

November 2021

In his eighth collection, the celebrated poet Jim Moore looks into unrelenting darkness where moments of tenderness and awe illuminate, at times suddenly like lightning in the night, at others, more quietly, as the steady glow of streetlights in a snowstorm. These are poems of both patience and urgency, of necessary attendance and helpless exuberance in the breathing world—something rare in contemporary poetry. Written in Minneapolis amid the COVID-19 pandemic’s masked and distanced loneliness, after the police murder of George Floyd, as an empire comes to an end, Prognosis turns toward the living moment as a surprising source of abundance. Here we find instances of essential human connection animated by a saving grace that pulls us back from depression and despair. Contemplating with playful wisdom what it is to brave the later years of one’s life, Moore revels in the possibilities of joy and mourns the limits of our capacity to greet the unknown with resolve and wonder. The prognosis Moore foresees demands continued stillness, continued movement: “Also known as going home,” he writes. “Also known as getting over yourself.”

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UNDERGROUND: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS
Graywolf Press, 2011

Jim Moore’s first career retrospective shows a poet whittling down experience to its essential confrontation with one’s own limitations, whether it be time running short, or understanding running thin, or capacity running low to think or feel or love enough. Underground gathers the best poems from across Moore’s seven previous books and includes twenty new poems. This is the definitive volume by a poet of great depth and generosity.

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INVISIBLE STRINGS
Graywolf Press, 2011

Brief, jagged, haiku-like, Jim Moore’s poems in Invisible Strings observe time moving past us moment by moment. In that accrual, line by line, is the anxiety and acceptance of aging, the mounting losses of friends to death or divorce, the accounting of frequent flyer miles and cups of coffee, and the poet’s own process of writing. It is a world of both diminishment and triumphs. Moore has assembled his most emotionally direct and lyrically spare collection, one that amounts to his book of days, seasons, and stark realizations.

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LIGHTNING AT DINNER
Graywolf Press, 2005

Jim Moore’s sixth collection—loving and grief-ridden—bears down on loss and how to render it in art with clarity enough to outlast our small, brief lives. Through the anguish of a mother’s death, the ravaged beauty of foreign landscapes, and the turmoil of political misrule, these poems arrive at both elegy and celebration for human limitations.

Winner of the 2006 Minnesota Book Award for Poetry

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THE LONG EXPERIENCE OF LOVE
Milkweed Editions, 1995

As its title suggests, The Long Experience of Love is, before all else, a book of love poems. Whether addressed to a specific person or evoking a memory, landscape, or the spirit of a painting, the poems honor both the presence of love and its loss. Moore writes of the common losses by which we know our lives: the loss of family, the friends who leave us, the desires that don’t come to pass. Moore’s tone is often elegiac, but it is also often ecstatic. He tells his secrets, names his pain without self-pity. These poems offer the delight of discovering that the most surprising of revelations may be sprung, the most subtle of effects achieved, by language that is immediate and accessible. The poet’s voice is easy, the music as natural as breathing.

Winner of the 1996 Minnesota Book Award for Poetry

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Many of the poems can be found in Underground: New and Selected Poems

THE FREEDOM OF HISTORY
Milkweed Editions, 1988

The Freedom of History continues Jim Moore’s focus on themes established in The New Body. Jim says,”It is the rub of history—personal and public, against the feeling of freedom and uniqueness that we experience as individuals—that inspires me to write. . . . I am interested in the times when personal and political history liberate, and the times when they oppress. But I am also drawn to the times when history, for brief intense periods, seems to disappear altogether, and we inhabit a more meditative and solitary world which gives us a very different perspective on our lives and on that world.”

Winner of the 1989 Minnesota Book Award for Poetry

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Many of the poems can be found in Underground: New and Selected Poems