Sweet Velocity

Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. Winner of the 2015 Besmilr Brigham Women Writers Award. Rachel Moritz's powerfully sweet SWEET VELOCITY delivers a lived-in world—material, object- oriented and also lyrically distinctive. The song here treats a serene, sometimes bemused, engagement with life passages—the essentials of coming into and going out of the world, of bringing about and of letting go. But Moritz's song, like the Dickinsonian one, also abrades the conventions it observes. Poetry is the result. An eccentric system. "[S]tops of flow before the animal."

"Rachel Moritz's poems are a presence, and in being so they reflect all that is absent from them. Absorbed by their language and their mystery, I think of Wallace Stevens who writes about the 'Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.' As Moritz writes, this is the magic of poetry: 'Something transparent, / we know, / still contains.' In SWEET VELOCITY, the nothing that is appear as footnotes that act the way light does when casting a shadow: people, reflections, and observations appear, cohering at thresholds but not fully coming into view. There are silhouettes of a mother, a child. And there is everything else that comes into these poems as the space that surrounds them. Moritz's poems are exquisitely crafted reminders that our inner self is a 'figment of making.' There is such sweet velocity in following how her figments subtly transform through the lines of her language, which seem to mark and erase at the same time. Exquisite!"—Kirstin Prevallet