Heart Less

Bring your heart, your sweet heart, tender and busted, and "step through" into Carley Moore's dazzling new poems. Heart Less gifts readers good intimate company on a city street, in a bar, and on the page-whether one's heart is hurt, on ice, or thawed out. Moore takes us on a wild razor scooter ride through NYC and to a Time portal: to a garbage dump for the past self, or "all horizon, all vista" for the future self. And, for those with a hard heart, hag heart, smarting heart, Moore's poems offer a poem ritual to survive middle age, dating online, and parenting. Carley's own heart, a "waterfall" of worry and desire, charmed and crushed me in these poems, full of word-and-sound play, role play and foreplay. Step through all lovers, misfits, parents, dreamers, and rioters! Heart Less is the book for you. -Camille Guthrie, author of DIAMONDS

Heart Less instantly places Carley Moore in the pantheon of essential New York School poets. In this long-awaited debut, these 'hard hurting animal' poems lead us to whimsy and weariness, often in the same stanza. Moore transforms motherhood and the human ritual of bodies old and new, pre and post, set inside a list-making candor and process. These are poems that are unafraid to stop in the middle of the street to write a poem, to embrace our dumb hearts, to 'stack feelings, smash them together' and 'crush them until they're gone.' This breakthrough collection demands our attention. -Daniel Nester, author of Harsh Realm: My 1990s, How to Be Inappropriate, God Save My Queen: A Tribute, and many others

The heart becomes a character in these poems perhaps talking to the heart in O'Hara's pocket walking the same streets of downtown NYC. This poet-heart can travel outside of the body with craggy movement (reflected in the poem's formal desires, sometimes looking like an EKG), an ambassador for closeness. Carley Moore writes about things like dating, divorce, motherhood, teaching with vulnerability and humor, creating my favorite kind of book - the absurd life and times of a writer making it another day. "We meet at the Guitar Center and then I buy you a sangria." It's a matter of fact and full of blood pumping heart. -Stacy Szymaszek, author of Famous Hermits, The Pasolini Book, and many others