2022//60 copy limited edition

Moira J Saucer is a disabled poet living in the Alabama Wiregrass. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. Her worked has appeared in literary magazines and anthologies in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada including Black Bough Poetry Freedom- Rapture anthology, Visual Verse, Fly on the Wall Press, Ice Floe Press, Mooky Chick, Floodlight Editions, and Fevers of the Mind Poets of 2020.

Advance Praise for Wiregrass:

Wiregrass and Other Poems opens with a fall so desolating that it shakes the ground and all life on it; one body falls and “most people fall away”. “There is no moral / to this story. / Fuck mythic suffering,” warns Moira J. Saucer, but there are roses. Between the two, between the suffering and the roses, a whole life from windows to doors of a mobile home, and a pecan garden in the Alabama Wiregrass and a whole lot of family heavy lifting. In poems that dazzle, pull close and devastate, she has given us her best and it’s a perspicacious feast

—V. B. Borjen, author of Priručnik za levitiranje (Mak Dizdar Award, 2012) and Odjezd (DARMA BOOKS Contest for Best Manuscript, 2021)

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Moira J Saucer’s Wiregrass and Other Poems excavates a fragmented Earth—one that’s on the brink of shattering into bit and pieces. Exploring the heaviness of human nature, Saucer captures and releases pain—like flashes from a Polaroid—revealing a wounded world. These poems are in search of healing and solace while knowing that perhaps, such a realization could be just a mirage forming at the intersection of technological and rural hemispheres. Maybe, it all just ends with a rose—maybe, that is all we just need.

— Shome Dasgupta, author of Cirrus Stratus

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Moira J Saucer’s collection, Wiregrass and Other Poems takes the reader on a journey through metaphysical and physical suffering. Trapped by both pain and love, we watch as human cruelty, darkness and the proximity of death transform the poet to a mythic figure, shamanic and powerful. In this mythos, hope is a potent force – when it can be found, and if it is not undercut by cruelty, as in Flower Thief:

they call me a flower thief
my crimes stealing stars
hope from the gods brilliant light

Both fragile and fervent, the poems show how the world ‘might’ be if only a poet's vision can hold true for long enough, and if they are offered a conduit. In ‘Midwife’, a turning point in the book, Moira J Saucer shows us both the hurt of pent-up words and the cathartic energy of their release. The poems which follow remain bleak, but underneath we sense a channelled hopefulness; even as the narrator washes a sick parent and grieves they are able to harness their own wonder, glimpse redemption. Words become a conduit for magic and for hope. In the final poem, ‘Did I tell you’, the collection ends with rain and roses. The poet has found respite, and we are eased into their final transformation, reflective and at peace.

—Sarah-Jane Crowson, poet, visual artist, critic
Fellow Royal Society of Arts