Quill & Parchment: Hazards of Grace

Hazards of Grace
by Gary Worth Moody
84 pages/ poems
Publisher: Red Mountain Press (June 1, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0979986575
ISBN-13: 978-0979986574

About the Book Poetry. Gary Worth Moody's HAZARDS OF GRACE journeys through landscapes, natural and familial that bridge the 20th and 21st centuries. The work harnesses the tension between lyric and narrative forms to mirror the collective memory of a generation balanced on the cusp of history. The characters that inhabit these poems, farmers, ranchers, damaged war veterans, Siberian miners, gravediggers, and denizens of the wild, wield equally brutality and love. From barren ruined farmsteads and ranches of west Texas, Siberian coal mines, the claustrophobic woodlands of Virginia, the city surrounding the Pentagon on September 11, and finally to the ascetic landscapes of northern New Mexico, HAZARDS OF GRACE illuminates the archetypal power of wildness to render us human.

Advance Praise

"In a time when so much poetry is weak tea, as minimalist as haiku but without that compressed density, Gary Worth Moody's comes on like a rare old bourbon, rich and complex and burning like fire. Its view of the mortality of everything is unflinching and sometimes startling, even as it celebrates life in its infinite varieties. HAZARDS OF GRACE is the most original poetic debut I have read in years."~Stephen Bodio

"With intricate, gorgeous language and syntactical leaps, HAZARDS OF GRACE hazards an exploration and incision into the paradoxical truths of love, grief, the natural world, and, like a blistering thread running through it, the father-son tie that binds and burns. The lunge of this book is broad and deep, held together with Moody's long and exquisite jewel-like lines." ~Veronica Golos

"Gary Worth Moody stares straight into both barrels of his father's sawed-off Ithaca shotgun in these unflinching poems. In speaking to us of 'the sacred separation between translation and interpretation,' he carries us into the precarious world of an encounter with Kazakh limes, black volcanic salt, and cheap tequila somewhere deep in the vodka-soaked heart of Siberia. But in the midst of it all–from the pain of a 'hard raising' to the psychiatrist's couch that follows–he walks us through the many hazards of grace...and life."~Nat Brown

About the Author

Raised on farms and ranches in Texas and New Mexico, Gary Worth Moody has worked as a forest firefighter and as a builder in the U.S. and Siberia. The founder of the 1980s Lost River Poetry Workshops, he is a past recipient of the Austin Poetry Prize, the Mary Roberts Rinehart Award and the Virginia Downs Poetry Award. His work has been published in various journals on both sides of the Atlantic. After surviving over 30 years in the Washington D.C. area, Gary, a falconer, now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with the writer and artist Oriana Rodman, three dogs, and a Red-tailed Hawk.

From the Book

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