Vanessa Moeller’s crisp poems and short stories have appeared in journals like The Fiddlehead, Prism International, The Antigonish Review, CV2, The Pottersfield Portfolio and Qwerty and have won several awards including the W.F.N.S’s 2002 Atlantic Poetry Prize. She’s a graduate of UNB’s MA in creative writing program.
I stumbled on her reading from this great collection two weeks ago at the WordsSpring festival, and was immediately asking people who she was was and what she was reading from. Poetry either grabs me like a hawk or passes me by uneventful as a Monday, and Moeller’s work sank in its talons. The lovely Akou Connell was kind enough to introduce us.
“Moeller’s Our Extraordinary Monsters is an extraordinary achievement.” – Fiddlehead
“How can this be Vanessa Moeller’s first collection? Her glowing, sensuous ‘language of amber’ only emphasizes the power of these poems. Anything can happen, and does happen, inside the pages of this marvelous book.” – Anne Simpson
Postcard of Broken Scissors Half Buried in Desert Sand
It’s the intimacy I miss, the oubliettes of the body,
being pressed against you:
the shell-tide echo next to my ear,
clench of heartbeat, blood pause,
long threads of air snaking through lung,
wet slosh of organs creating energy,
the imagined sound of cells as they die
or rebuild
or branch into some future death.
And I remember the afternoon you declared,
When I’m with you I feel like my heart’s trapped in amber.
I remained silent but thought,
Mine is preserved in formaldehyde.
I don’t believe in signing anything with love.
The Pulse of Trees
Bare branches stretched like veins across the blue
wrist of the sky. Trees as evidence
that the earth has a heart. Wooden arteries breaking through
the ground remind us of the presence
of a burning core that keeps us alive, moving through the mist
of years, decades, through the elliptical curve of orbit.
Your own heart, small as a clenched fist,
seems to weigh next to nothing but is there, its fit
perfect in the bare bone cage of your
ribs. Untangle its knot of vessels, stretch the empty
threads into a bleeding equator,
and circle the world two and a half times. The mystery
at our centre a milky area in the human heart with no function,
that some claim is the soul’s physical manifestation.
Shaping the Frame
- For my imagined daughter
To give birth to a small husk of storied molecules,
my father’s hands, my mother’s eyes, my angle of jaw
and a curve of lip from a great-great-great ancestor
whose identity is just beyond the long branches
of the family tree fading in the sitting room.
When my body begins to erode, age scuffing away
my surfaces, you will begin to fully inhabit
the chamber of your name, learn to siphon
knowledge from the world and rearrange it
to fit the nooks and alcoves of your character.
Eventually I will be disincarnated, reduced to
flecks and wind, but you will read me again
in the syntax of your own daughter’s body,
quixotic sylph who grows into the length
of a spine that reminds you of teak.
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