As the Moon has Breath

poems by
Doris Ferleger

100 pages. Cover price: $14 ($12 if ordered from the MSR Online Bookstore)

Release date: July 16, 2013.

Doris Ferleger

Doris Ferleger is the author of three volumes of poetry, Big Silences in a Year of Rain, As the Moon Has Breath, and When You Become Snow. Winner of the New Letters Poetry Prize and the A Room of Her Own (AROHO) Creative Non Fiction Prize, among others, her work has been published in numerous journals including Cimarron Review, L.A. Review, and South Carolina Review. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and a Ph.D. in psychology from Temple University, and maintains a private practice in mindfulness-based psychotherapy in Montgomery County, PA. Her website is www.dorisferleger.com.

Through ecstatic carousings of language, Doris Ferleger’s rhythmic poems travel the cavernous interior of the spirit and return with a matchless song, this book in your hand, As The Moon Has Breath, which irresistibly celebrates both acute love and deep-seated perceptions. The speaker in these poems possesses wisdom yet a whimsical nature, fully aware how transitory our lives. Such a formidable and spectacular work of art deserves our widest attention.

–Major Jackson

Doris Ferleger, like Dickinson, poignantly, explores the way that the death of a loved one throws the world off-kilter; the ordinary, even the ordinary meanings of words, is undone in such lines as “Ordinary, plain, neither lonely/nor not lonely/or whatever is the opposite of lonely. /Life without you is not life without you.” These memorable poems keep singing with their insistent beauty.

–Aliki Barnestone,
Judge for the New Letters Poetry Prize

Picture Over The Edge

Above my desk gladiolas
re-open every morning
thick and oily on the five-
by-five foot canvas, too big
to be buried with. Some days
violet, other days vermilion
grabs me by the throat. Tight
green buds show
no signs of which color
will reveal itself
in the morning. No one can say,
not even the experts,
whether the gladiola-
shaped mass with its tissue-
thin petals, folded-
open, is made merely of dead
tissue, or cells dangerously blooming.
Why not go a little crazy?
Open, close, open, shake and shake
the painting like a kaleidoscope,
jumble the little chips of light
so much that everything turns
to shards of beauty
and no sad story
can stick.

When You Become Snow

When you become snow, Love,
fresh fallen or later black ice
on the path by the river
when you become the river
and the silty bottom of the river
when the water becomes
you and also flows over you
when the river freezes in some places
and stays fluid in others and spider
patterns haunt the icy channels,
you won’t need to ask the river
if you are not only the marrow
that fills the hollow
but also the transparent skin
on the face of God.

Woman Who Pulls

How often I see her
the woman who pulls
her own hair and screams
in the far left corner–
she could
take over
if I paid her
any mind. I do
keep track of her
as she is the one
I believe I could be
all the time,
grief plundering
as it wants,
were it not for the steady
pulse of the sea,
red-billed tropicbird
that runs up and down
the white-foam corridor, stops
ten feet from me, stares with one
yellow eye, one black
unblinking center.

If you would like to read more of As the Moon Has Breath by Doris Ferleger, order your copy today.