Amanda Chimera

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

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Amanda Chimera by Mary B. Moore explores our hybrid nature as body and something else––mind, soul, spirit––through poems spoken by and about the persona Amanda. Haunted by her vanished twin, Gloria, who died in utero and some of whose DNA she absorbed, Amanda views herself as hybrid and thus as a monster, a carrier of the dead. Grounded in nature’s grace and variety, domestic life, and family dynamics, poems on art and myth focus on hybrid creatures, paralleling Amanda and Gloria. The sisters’ relationship is as varied as the poems’ tones: as Amanda says, she “likes a mixed diction.” Sometimes loving or sorrowful, sometimes witty and wry, the work revels in image and word music.

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Praise for Amanda Chimera by Mary B. Moore…

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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

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“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

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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

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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

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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

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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.