The Bishop's Daughter: A Memoir

(W.W. Norton & Company, 2008; paperback edition, by W.W. Norton & Company, 2009

Paul Moore’s vocation as an Episcopal priest took him – with his wife Jenny and a family that grew to nine children – from robber baron wealth to work among the urban poor of postwar America, prominence as an activist bishop in Washington during the Johnson years, leadership in the Civil Rights and Peace movements, and two decades as the Bishop of New York

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The White Blackbird

(Viking/Penguin, 1996; paperback edition by W.W. Norton & Company, 2009)

At the heart of Margarett Sargent’s life lies a mystery, lost in silence. Why does a woman who has devoted herself to making art, stop? A marvelously gifted painter, Sargent spent much of her life smashing convention. She was born into stultifying privilege in the age of Edith Wharton, but sought another life. As the American art world shuddered under the impact of Modernism, Margarett was hurling bright colors onto canvas, forging her own unique style

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Red Shoes

(W.W. Norton & Company, 2005)

In her third collection Honor Moore returns to the territory that has marked her earlier poems—what Mark Doty characterized as “charged meditation on the passage of time and the complexities and persistence of desire.” Red Shoes opens with an arrangement of sexy, almost surreal lyrics and continues in a sequence of extended dream-meditations—near poem, near lyric essay— that explore the terrain between sleep and waking, life and death.

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Darling

(Grove Press, 2001)

From the Foreword by Richard Howard:
Houses, certainties, passions—they are lost, in the course of life; it is such losses, in fact, that some poetry acknowledges to be living. But as I read through this new book of Honor Moore’s, which follows upon The White Blackbird, her 1996 account of the painter Margarett Sargent, who was her grandmother; her first book of poems of 1988, accountably titled Memoir; and even Mourning Pictures, her verse play of 1974, I note with some assurance that the poetic impulse here is not simply to record loss—to mourn and thereby release the energies in us that choose to mourn rather than to founder in melancholy—but also to bear witness, to testify to the truth, to get it down not pat but right.

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Memoir

(Chicory Blue Press, 1988)

As if excavating her life, Honor Moore has uncovered with care the artifacts of the heart, and with deep intelligence explored the fissures in common speech and the shiftings of consciousness beneath them. At memory’s insistence she has written this book, which opens with one of the most important poetic meditations on nuclear war to have been published during the past decade and concludes with an intimate, almost epistolary poem about a friend who died of AIDS. We are thus in the presence of a poet who can be praised not only for the eloquence and musicality of her voice, but also for the courage of her moral engagement. It is not only beautiful work, it is brave.
— Carolyn Forché

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Revenge

(Feminist Press at CUNY, 2010)
Translated by Honor Moore

In contemporary Bangladesh, Jhumur marries for love and imagines life with her husband, Haroon, will continue much as it did when they were dating. But once she crosses the threshold of Haroon’s family home, Jhumur finds she is expected to be the traditional Muslim wife: head covered, eyes averted, and unable to leave the house without an escort. When she becomes pregnant, Jhumur is shocked to discover that Haroon doesn’t believe the baby is his. Overwhelmed by his mistrust, Jhumur plots her revenge in the arms of a handsome neighbor. A stunning tale of love, lust, and blood ties.

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Poems from the Women's Movement

From the Library of America catalog:

“The Women’s Movement of the 1960s, 70s and 80s generated an extraordinary outpouring of poetry that captured an age of expectancy, of ecstatic possibility, of defiant purpose, and of exuberant exploration. In gathering the best of this poetry, Honor Moore has performed an act of recovery that shows the remarkable range in both form and subject matter of that era’s poetry, including work by Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Muriel Rukeyser, Judy Grahn, and many others.”

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The Stray Dog Cabaret

(A New York Review Books, 2007)

In the years before the 1917 Russian Revolution, the Stray Dog cabaret in St. Petersburg was the haunt of poets, artists, and musicians, a place to meet, drink, read, brawl, celebrate, and stage performances of all kinds. It has since become a symbol of the extraordinary literary ferment of that time. It was then that Alexander Blok composed his apocalyptic sequence “Twelve”; that the futurists Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Mayakovsky exploded language into bold new forms; that the lapidary lyrics of Osip Mandelstam and plangent love poems of Anna Akhmatova saw the light; that the electrifying Marina Tsvetaeva stunned and dazzled everyone

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Amy Lowell : Selected Poems

(The Library of America,2004) Honor Moore, Editor

A cigar-smoking proponent of free- verse modernism in open rebellion against her distinguished Boston lineage, Amy Lowell cut an indelible public figure. But in the words of editor Honor Moore, “what strikes the modern reader is not the sophistication of Lowell’s feminist or anti-war stances, but the bald audacity of her eroticism.”

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The New Women’s Theatre (Vintage Books, 1977)

“During the sixties, much of the theatre did not touch real women in spite of the number of female dramatists. But in the seventies, with the shift in the theatre away from ‘absurdism’ and back to a kind of realism, women have begun to write from their own experience. The women playwrights of the seventies are not part of a single movement; they write in many different styles and come to the theatre with many different life-histories….All over the country, women are beginning to create plays, not only from their own lives, but that dramatize history, bring our foremothers to life.

 

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