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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.
Wiregrass and Other Poems review by David L O’Nan
I have been lucky enough to read Wiregrass and Other Poems and just the wonderful, melancholy collective works of Moira J. Saucer. I admire Moira's writing and have been inspired to keep writing short story style poetry & prose due to Moira encouraging me with a story I submitted a few years ago to IceFloe Press. I actually knew someone was actually reading my work again. I received a "Best of the Net Nomination" for this piece and thank Moira, and IceFloe Press very much for keeping my confidence and expanding my style of writings now into my 40's. This collection from Moira, is the gut of her soul. It is the heartbreak, the sadness, the wanting to escape, the bewitching hour of living in the darkness and wondering if the moon will shine down on some Alabama Wiregrass tonight. It is a recovery, back into your own cynicism, to lost, to feeling Godless to feeling God is in everything. Wiregrass and Other Poems pours the aching hours of years into one quick ride that you learn the heart of Moira. The kindness of Moira, and where our mind goes when ends are coming. The Darkness of Moira. I sit in this same kind of wanting solace, but never seeing the real Sun. Almost like a ghost, the sun fades quickly just are you are discovering it is there. "When You Fall" : "There you are conveniently sick and poor. You are trouble wrapped in thrift store clothes, a motley creature with little possibility for redemption" a sad poem about remembering a more youthful time as a woman and feeling trapped by the never-ending days that stretch our mind more and more into the unknown. "I survived the dark descent, the five years of shame, poverty and- and yes hell." "Homeless and Broke" : A tale that feels like you're forever traveling long dark Alabama roads. As i've done many times traveling from Kentucky/Indiana to New Orleans by car. Forever on dark Alabama roads. You get that sneak of Mobile, Birmingham, Tuscaloosa, Montgomery. But then you just see shadowy trees that jump-stare at you like Frankenstein's Monster at 3 A.M. looking for the Waffle House sign that doesn't sound good. "I lay awake at night the pain from Fibro like sharp invisible knives thrusting and turning into muscle and tendon. The portent of my death" Long lasting pain just like a long night of dark roads....doesn't ever feel to end. "Woman A/The" : A remembrance of glory days now feel like descent. "She lies in a cot. The roaches crawl on her white skin. Flies hover over her bloody chest" "When She was dying" for Quinn : A poem about memories, where you'd like to stay in those memories. But family, a mother has to fade and you're never ready. "She wore an otherworldly glow flushed from love and cancer" "Wiregrass" : A poem of the wildness that once was. Alabama nights lead to the mischief, the rebellion, the fun, the regrets, the sadness in old lightbulbs. "My days are spent cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, praying. Praying to stave off sorrow and madness, but sometimes these twin demons...wait outside the doors for blindness to set in, for gladness to fade" "Wounds" A poem about caring for someone who no longer can care fully for themselves. The sadness they have seeps into yourself. And it just becomes too much to handle. "Our bodies knit together flesh so we can go on living...but the wound memory is always there" "Flower Thief" A wonderfully put together poem that must be read. Very metaphorically, yet visibly strong. Imagery shines. "the pallid woman told him she saw me stealing flowers... they call me a flower thief my crimes stealing stars hope from the gods brilliant light" "Kindness" Heartbreak poem....love, lost, love, deception, love, forgiveness, or a void. "She didn't fight the judgments. It was important to avoid ruffling waters, telling the truth. He had claimed to be an honest man, yet blamed her for his lust" "Marbles" wonderful imagery. "I love marbles...bought beautiful ones in Chicago just to gaze at them lost now" comparisons of just watching something in amazement for what it is and not what it should be. "Charolais" "The Whole property was once pecan trees and cattle...Now there is only a pasture".... "Midwife for Robert" about friendship, motivation, refreshed, and appreciative of art, poetry, work, what a non-narcissistic view will help guide you to greatness when it comes to writing, art, your true heart's desire. The creative starvation sometimes has to be purged back out with the hope. "Poems began to die from lack of oxygen...the poems and I began to die" "Origins, at Sixty-Five" I've read this poem many times and always amazed by how well it is structured together to convey to never give up what creates you and what you create. "I shook the grain out into my hand, ancient yet bright, polished and buffed by the seas" "Summertime" Stuck in the muck of another summer down South during the hardest times, wanting to get out, but fate will not let you escape at this time.... "It's time for tornado season with no shelter, no place to hide, and it's god-awful-hot under the canopy of scabbed pecan trees" "Loss" The frustrations during the hardest period of time as a grand whole for the country. Especially, when you are living down south and what is fed to you is a machine of mudslinging. "Pastels, beautiful colors, rolling onto emptiness of white space. I wept blending them-radiant pigments, a gorgeous burning nightmare" "Night Visitation" "Roads in Alabama roll away like giant tar pits, the blackness-deafening, dangerous" "Vampire Story" A story/poem about after you lose someone and you just search for anything to keep your mind off it. To infatuate yourself with anything. A story. Mundane, love, cheesiness, or just leave me alone everyone and let me transcend away for awhile. "August, 2019" Very well put together poem using nature as a symbol in the imagery representing the blooming and the blackness of rolling clouds through the Summer. "The garden flowers now shriveled, having bloomed into scattered color madness" "Chrysalis (Queer Butterfly)" "The open road is transformed...I wait for you in a garden dense and fragrant" a beautiful poem. "Did I Tell You" "We create another self...dissociate to absorb trauma." "The Second self watches from a distance being battered and gets exhausted too" brilliant! 4 poems from Fevers of the Mind Poets of 2020 by Moira J Saucer Pandemic Love & other Affinities from Icefloe press an anthology Current bio for Fevers of the Mind’s David L O’Nan editor/writing contributor to blog. *Announcements for October including release of Deluxe Edition of Before the Bridges Fell (Fevers of the Mind Press)* Paperback & Kindle version of Cursed Houses is now available from David L O’Nan on this link below
Fevers of the Mind 