Description
Amanda Chimera: Poems
WINNER OF THE 2023 ARTHUR SMITH POETRY PRIZE
poems by Mary B. Moore
ISBN: 978-1-963695-05-2 paperback $19.95
ISBN: 978-1-963695-06-9 ebook $9.99
January 21, 2025
The Book Launch
Praise for Amanda Chimera by Mary B. Moore…
Inside every woman is another woman, a vanished twin, not so invisible as erased. We know her, don’t we? The other self, the monster, who we hate to love. The sister. The mother. The Earth. The little girl we once were, the one who learned shame. Amanda Chimera has come to remind us that it is our life’s work, loving her, letting go of the many forms of self-hate we inherit. Here is a spiritually urgent myth, as delightful as it is fierce, ensuring Mary B. Moore’s place as an essential feminist poet of the Appalachian tradition.—Rebecca Gayle Howell, author of American Purgatory
“Vertigo is her dance”: combining classical erudition with a postmodern sensibility through the story of a twin who absorbed her dead sister’s DNA in utero, Mary B. Moore explores the mysteries of identity, doubleness, agency, and biological/generational destiny as she peels apart layers of consciousness and time.—Claire Bateman, author of Wonders of the Invisible World
Amanda Chimera offers rich evidence of a poet who has come into her own. Using the duality of Amanda, and the “monstrous” ghost of her vanished twin, Gloria, Moore illuminates the shadowy corridors of personhood, individuality, and consciousness in language both incisive and frolicking. —Frank Paino, author of Dark Octaves
In Amanda Chimera, Mary B. Moore addresses an unsettling truth—something’s inside her that’s not her. In poems composed of coursing blood, the budding limbs of a fetus, a flower, a bird—the reader is introduced to Amanda and her twin absorbed in utero. The challenge of a lifetime is to fearlessly explore our shadow selves, and Moore has done this brilliantly.—Robert Carr, author of The Heavy of Human Clouds
A search for wholeness that is more a celebration of the flawed, the broken, the incomplete. With deep empathy, surprise, and language rich and playful as Hopkins, Amanda Chimera is a brilliant whiplash of a book that delights and challenges.—Lauren Slaughter, author of Spectacle
Mary B. Moore’s published books include Dear If, Orison Books 2021; Flicker, Dogfish Head Award, 2016; The Book of Snow, Cleveland State U Poetry Center, 1998; and the prize-winning chapbooks Amanda and the Man Soul and Eating the Light. Poems appear lately in Birmingham Poetry Review, POETRY, Tahoma Literary Review, Nimrod, Prairie Schooner, NELLE, Terrain, Calyx, Still: The Journal, Crosswinds, and more. She has won NELLE’s Three Sisters Prize, Birmingham Poetry Review’s Collins Prize, and the second-place award in Nimrod’s 2017 Pablo Neruda Prize. She is a native Californian and was a professor at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, where she now lives.
Articles, Interviews, and Reviews
Book Reviews:
![Rosa Lane's PostRosa Lane March 27 · How hauntingly exquisite is Mary B. Moore’s “Amanda Chimera” (MadVille Publishing, 2025), winner of the 2023 Arthur Smith Poetry Prize, a poetry collection to own! Mary Barbara Moore, I am smitten. From sunlight that “Gloria” sees as “yellow pencils / …the blinds throw down,” to how “t]he window oak confettis / the light, and every iota / stutters…” —Mary, how ungodly fresh and edgy. The trifecta: I (the storyteller), Gloria (her womb-death lingering DNA), and Amanda (monster of secrets) waft and woof, ravel/unravel, and expose. We are reminded about hiding that comes from shame—the othering, nonbelonging, and “Me Too.” Moore’s “Amanda Chimera” allows us the “kodachromed me,” who “…loved the two-holed / double-lens reflex, flat-nosed, / box-headed, square window / where brains should be stowed.” The camera exposes again in Moore’s poignant and gripping poem “Amaryllis Belladonna:” “He’s arrested and not for a camera’s / exposure, his penis a pink / microphone. Maybe it beseeches / alone and untouchable to go— / See me, it says, I am. / When I was seven, a man showed me his / from a car door.” Moore’s “Amanda Chimera,” poem after poem, unmutes, reveals, brings light into our darkest corners; and its evocative call of “The Atomic Woman” — her longing to reassemble wholly: “read me, rhyme me, / make me cohere.” These are the last words in this oh, so carefully sequenced 4-part poetry collection. Moore’s “Amanda Chimera” is an urgent and necessary book, a book for the othered, for those disembodied for whatever reason, for our process of re-embodiment, and for secrets hungering to be seen, heard, and known. Bravo, Bravo, Bravo! Mary Barbara Moore! ORDER: https://madvillepublishing.com/product/amanda-chimera/](https://madvillepublishing.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Screenshot-2025-04-30-at-11.38.21 AM-1017x1024.png)
Interviews:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1912726/episodes/15622405-mary-b-moore-cody-duncan-and-thea-hudson\ Click image above to hear the interiview.
kpdavis –
I have not crowed enough about AMANDA CHIMERA! This is a poetry collection like none other, with Amanda haunted by a twin she absorbed en utero. She names her vanished twin and both speak. It’s called persona poetry, and Mary B. Moore does it so well!