Everything, now

Poems about being stranded in a truth that shows no mercy, speaking from the last place you'd ever choose to go.

Part lyric, part memoir, Everything, now, Jessica Moore's heart-rending debut, describes an untimely death and the journey of going on alone. The book stares down loss and struggles to transform that loss into language that can pass through boundaries of intricate sorrow; the act of translation here is not about two different languages—although Moore uses her own translation of Jean-François Beauchemin's Turkana Boy as a template for translating death into life, past into present—but about the necessity to put the inexplicable into words that might hint at its intensity. The fact at the core of Everything, now is the death of Moore's lover in a sudden, tragic bicycle accident. But rather than simply detail such a catastrophe, Moore strives to bring memory back to full colour. How do we hold on to what totally escapes us? Where does love end and grief begin? Are they one and the same thing in a circumstance such as this?