“All Throats Sound Animal” by Devon Moore, winner of the 2017 Cider Press Review Editors’ Prize Book Award, has just come back from the printer, and it is a joy. All entrants to the 2017 Editors’ Prize will receive a copy. For all y’all others, it is available in the CPR bookstore.
Advance praise for All Throats Sound Animal:
“In All Throats Sound Animal, Devon Moore has assembled poems from the empathetic imagination—alert, simultaneously delicate and strong, like raw silk. This is a collection to be read carefully and slowly for this is a poetics of compassion.”
—Stephen Kuusisto, author of Only Bread, Only Light and Letters to Borges.
“Devon Moore is a poet gifted with the voice and vision of love, persistently true, even in pain. Her poems give that gift in ways that leave me, page after page, astonished and grateful.”
—Brooks Haxton, author of They Lift Their Wings to Cry and My Blue Piano.
“The poems of Devon Moore’s All Throats Sound Animal are elegiac—many of them responding to a father’s death—and yet, at the same time, lively, bursting with wishes, with curiosity for and delight in the natural world. . . . Mourning is not some bedridden, curtains-drawn activity for Moore’s speaker; hers is a raucous, pulsing, world-filled reckoning with loss—and the imperative to keep going. To read this book is to confront how we are haunted, nomadic, hungry creatures.”
—Chen Chen, author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities.
Enjoy the book’s title poem:
All Throats Sound Animal
The X-ray showed that the cat’s heart was three-times too big
& it wasn’t a metaphor.
The cat died from one dose of poison straight into its shaved leg,
its waiting vein.
The cat was buried or burned to grey & white bone ash.
We never knew which.
We left its body with the animal doctors
to be done with what the animal doctors willed.
They said it was the merciful thing to do
for both parties.
Imagine if we killed our fathers like we killed our cats.
What a mercy.
We wouldn’t have to listen to their mewling
pleas & screams from the porcelain tub.
We wouldn’t have to carry home their ashes
& the black & white shadowed light
of an organ gone awry. We wouldn’t have to sit long
with the knowing that each cell is its own dark planet,
that each body contains constellations, that even
with all the exploring
of lasers & scalpels, we may start expanding, inexplicably,
contained only by our protruding skin & our bone frames
made from the same calcium as stars.
With thanks to Nightblock, in which the poem first appeared.
About the Author
Devon Moore is the author of Apology of a Girl Who Is Told She Is Going to Hell (Mayapple Press, 2015) which was a finalist for the Binghamton University Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, Meridian, The Cortland Review, New Ohio Review, Juked, and elsewhere. She lives, writes, and teaches in Syracuse, NY.
About the Book
All Throats Sound Animal
Poetry by Devon Moore.
Winner of the 2017 Cider Press Review Editors’ Prize Book Award.
ISBN: 978-1-930781-52-8
Binding: Tradepaper
Pub date: October, 2018
