News
An Interview with Laura Moriarty, Author of Which Walks
July 1, 2025
Laura Moriarty’s Which Walks, out now from Nightboat, confronts aging and its discontents with the old adage, “If you leave off you are lost.” Walking, and “witchiness” (“I’ve hosted a few covens,” she says below), become the means for Moriarty to probe compounding personal and political crises.
In our conversation we discuss the project’s origins and inspirations, from art criticism to archaeology, and the “other magics” of poetry.
—Daye Jung
Review: “Laura Moriarty, Which Walks,” by rob mclennan, rob mclennan’s blog, May 21, 2025
Essay: “Portrait of Norma Cole,” in That Tongue Be Time: Norma Cole and a Continuous Making, edited by Dale Smith, University of New Mexico Press, 2025
Laura Moriarty will read from Which Walks on Thursday May 15 at 7:00 PM at Tally Ho! Books, 3941 Piedmont Ave. in Oakland.
Which Walks is a unique and exciting collection “documenting (and interrogating) the poet’s daily walks. [It] investigates the twin practices of walking and art-making while aging. Intensely feminist, Moriarty’s book relates to the endlessly unfinished journeys of Nathaniel Mackey’s long poems, as well as to the dailiness of many writers from Charles Baudelaire to Robert Creeley. These poems are an extension of the author’s visual practice, which she is returning to after a fifty-year break.”
Also featured is author Eric Sneathen, whose collection Don’t Leave Me This Way “queers the sonnet by placing a different kind of impossible love at its center: the dead of the AIDS era, whose archives so infuse these lines that our shared history comes alive.”
This is the first of three events at Tally Ho! Books to celebrate Nightboat Books’ extraordinary 20 years of vital work in small press publishing.
We, the prosodic beings
comes from dread about the threats and crimes of our current government, along with an interest in dolls, robots, puppets, and other human adjacent entities. The poem of the same name is part of a book in progress called Even Venus.
Curated by Norma Cole, this installation is being presented at Right Window, 992 Valencia St., San Francisco in April, 2025.
Join us for a reading and reception on Tuesday April 22. Timing is 6-8pm, reading at 7. Cookies, wine and various waters to be served.
My book Which Walks is forthcoming from Nightboat Books on July 1of this year. Contact me or the press for advance or review copies.
There is contact info on my site. Comments are welcome.
Which Walks
Nightboat Books, 2025
“We age as we see; we see in our aging all we have done — all we have made, all we have read, everyone we have known — and it’s this seeing that moves us in and through and out beyond the world. Laura Moriarty’s Which Walks proves it. This is a profound and intimate study of being with at a crucial time where many feel without. A book (and a way to love) that we need.” - Renee Gladman
“Moriarty is our intrepid ‘archeologist of the present’ offering this long poem of expansive love to attune our walking, making, and remembering.” - Alli Warren
“‘Where we stand//mindfully outside the universe of words/…suspended in the phantom of equilibrium,’ — and now aware that the stability we once assumed is an illusion. From this strange position (or perhaps superposition) inside and outside the sayable, Moriarty makes language sing. - Rae Armantrout
North Bay Letterpress Arts
presented a reading to celebrate National Poetry Month
on Sunday, April 7th, 2024 at 5pm
featuring
Laura Moriarty
Elizabeth Heron
Athena Rya
North Bay Letterpress Arts
925-D Gravenstein Highway South Sebastopol, California 95472
The Poetry I Felt Was Walking: Brett Goodroad and Laura Moriarty in Conversation is on The Back Room at Small Press Traffic. (4/18/2023)
A selection of poems and related artworks appear in Posit 32 (January, 2023).
[image from rapt glass]