Thief by Katrinka Moore

In a series of interlocking text-image meditations and small narratives, Katrinka Moore’s Thief rewrites the literary impulse to claim. This thievery confesses our visitor status upon body, mind, land, and book and asks, “So, you select your shape purposefully? How to explore this obscure site? How does the world assemble?” The journey is gendered: how does a woman write into a literary and family history that was actually never so sure of its claims, its own thievery? It is no coincidence that the word “light” accompanies several of Moore’s “unmoored” plunges into Dickinsonian “Tangent, a hint of owl.” By the end of the book, there is peace. Thief invites us to take the plunge, to take space back, so that we may gift beauty upon the places where distress has made some bindings too weak to hold.

– Jill Magi, author of Threads (Futurepoem Books)

The poem, per se, is not enough for Katrinka Moore. Erasure, augmentation, the poem cut into lines or sections & repositioned. Decorated, separated. Placed in or out of context. On maps, postcards, found stationery. The contradictions. Electronic lines on a notebook page, handwritten annotations on the typeset.  Or: there are secret poems at the core of pages from the books of others. A similar technique, but the direction is different. Microscope rather than telescope. For Moore, the finished poem is often only the starting point, & even in many of those she “leaves alone,” spaces are inserted for them to breathe through, to grow. In Thief we see them all flowering.

– Mark Young, editor of Otoliths

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Katrinka Moore’s chapbook, This is Not a Story (Finishing Line Press, 2003) won the New Women’s Voices Prize in Poetry.  Her poems appear in magazines, online journals, and anthologies, including Otoliths, di-vêrse?-city, Georgetown Review, CLWN WR, and Milkweed Editions’ Stories from Where We Live.

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