AUTOBLIVION traces the difficulties of raising a young child in the Anthropocene. Haunted by the looming, seeming inevitability of environmental collapse, the poems invoke traditional storytelling genres such as the parable and fairy tale to look back to the past for models of looking forward into the unknown. The collection also explores threads of love and loss including my father's sudden death when I was a child. With the understanding of the future itself as an unavoidable oblivion, ultimately the collection serves as a love letter to a daughter and her childhood, an act of preserving what can be preserved for this moment only, and an act of preparing for an opaque future.
"This book--and Moody's work at large--is steeped in a reverent compassion that becomes the catalyst of a salvaged awe for the world. The ethos here is a quiet yet expansive celebration, not just of life but the fractures within it, too. Like the finest poems, these lyrics estrange the mundane, rendering it into such singular and clear prisms, the familiar is both newly found and, in Moody's deft hands, inimitable."--Ocean Vuong
"Some of these poems have their feet on the ground, and some of them leave the earth; in both directions they are full of grim wonder, and the reader feels as though they have been shaken awake in the middle of the night."--Mary Ruefle
Poetry.