Diminuendo

The poems of Katrinka Moore's Diminuendo are meditations toward "mending brokenness," and they hold and encourage consideration within their very form. As Moore considers hawks, bees, stars, wind, and the mysteries of entanglement posed by quantum physics, her short-lined poems open space to pause and breathe: "like any animal I live / with my own need and / that of others how / they rub together / your hunger mine." These openings ask the reader to slow, to turn a moment over like a stone in the palm and consider its wholeness and how it might feel differently if turned so, and so. Attentive to fact, embodied, imbued with emotional intelligence, Moore's poems invite us to encounter the "thing-ness" and the "being-ness" of the more-than-human world.

-Elizabeth Bradfield, author of Toward Antarctica

Though Katrinka Moore's Diminuendo is just as the title presents-a decrease in loudness, particularly from the constant noise of the world around us-this beautiful book of ethereal poems is anything but silent. Instead, there is a delicate singing, a lilt laced with image and metaphor, surprise and delight and, at its core, hope. We are at once "not being but becoming" while also a "crescendo through the wood." We find "delight in discord" and the "kinship of leaf and feather." And through Moore's keen eye and intricate craft-through a simple, beguiling attentiveness few other poets have mastered-we are transformed. Diminuendo is the quiet voice in the chaos. Listen, read: sanctuary is at hand.

-Simmons Buntin, Editor-in-Chief, Terrain.org