poems by

Patrick Moran

Poetry book, 68 pages, $14 cover price

ISBN: 978-1-59948-332-0

Released: 2011

Patrick Moran‘s poems, translations, and essays have been published in a variety of magazines including Crazyhorse, The New Republic, The Boston Review, The Antioch Review and The Green Mountain Review. He is currently an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. Dopplegangster is his second book. His first book, Tell A Pitiful Story, will be published by Midwestern Poet’s House in Fall of 2011.

If a poet is someone on whom nothing is lost, then Patrick Moran’s work can be greeted with superlatives, for in Dopplegangster he not only preserves but explores and extends the lexicon. Mirroring and expanding the vernacular, the work in this exciting and pleasurable book is far from being merely bookish: each poem reflects and illuminates our experience and the vocabulary we use to express it. Warm, wry, witty, and skillful, Moran’s work is a distinctive pleasure.

–Don Share
Senior Editor, Poetry

Reading Patrick Moran’s brilliant collection, I am reminded of Emily Dickson’s definition of poetry: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” These marvelous poems accomplish precisely that, wrenching open our heads and our hearts, defining a world we thought we knew from fresh and unexpected perspectives. Linguistically inventive, emotionally complex, and fiercely intelligent, these edgy, crystalline poems create a whole new lexicon, one which mines the secret of being human. A stunning and long awaited collection from one of our very best poets.

–Alison Townsend

Reverberape (r?-vûr?b?-r?p)

None doubted it was a swan after she
finished her story. If they felt anything
for her it was a kind of reluctant pity with
just a hint of thin lipped anger. As it
turned out, hers was not the only account;
weeping maidens came out of the
woodwork, blood-smirched & salt-
withered, but because she was the first to
speak, the first to make the swan’s
intentions known, peasant & servant alike
remarked upon her swollen womb as she
stood near the rotting fruit stalls. What
they said was not important, & except for
the gathering crowd of small/black flies,
it was a perfectly lovely afternoon.

Vernaculiar (v?r-n?k?y?-l???r)

Here’s where things get interesting.
Here’s where Herodotus meets Nixon in
the anterooms of Heaven. Here’s how
we play the game of Never: you keep
talking and I keep listening. Here’s how
we play the game of Probably: you cry & I
stare at the floor. When one player says
something sad like “I can’t do this
anymore,” the other player may challenge
it, or if he or she chooses to pass, the
lightning humiliation round begins.

Stimulust (st?m?y?-l?st)

Neither ingredient nor impulse, plant-
like/god-like/blossom breezed, the
orchard undressing, the orchard
breaking light into green fragments & blue
divisions, a body limbed with passion,
green with leafy desires, the majesty of
bees crowning the empty air with
purpose, the country of bees rescuing
touch, the religion of bees brocading the
skies with mad saints & furtive angel
wings, always the peasant, always the
filthy girl dreaming & lost on the bed of
warm grasses.