Everything, now

By Jessica Moore

Part lyric, part memoir, Everything, now, Jessica Moore’s heart-rending debut, describes an untimely death and the journey of going on alone. The book stares down loss and struggles to transform that loss into language that can pass through boundaries of intricate sorrow; the act of translation here is not about two different languages—although Moore uses her own translation of Jean-François Beauchemin’s Turkana Boy as a template for translating death into life, past into present—but about the necessity to put the inexplicable into words that might hint at its intensity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brick Books
• Release date: Feb 6, 2015
• ISBN: 9781771314275

Jessica Moore

Jessica Moore is an author and literary translator. Her first book, Everything, now (Brick Books, 2012), is a love letter to the dead and a conversation with her translation of Turkana Boy (Talonbooks, 2012) by Jean-François Beauchemin, for which she won a PEN Translation Prize. Mend the Living, her translation of the novel by Maylis de Kerangal, was nominated for the 2016 Man Booker International and won the UK’s Wellcome Prize in 2017. Moore’s most recent book, The Whole Singing Ocean (Nightwood, 2020), blends the genres of long poem, investigative journalism, and family history. She lives in Toronto.

Book preview

Everything, Now

Everything, Now

Jessica Moore

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Moore, Jessica, 1978-




Everything, now / Jessica Moore.

Poems.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-771314-27-5

1. Loss (Psychology)--Poetry. 2. Grief--Poetry. I. Title.

PS8626.O5939E94 2012      C811'6     C2012-903591-2

copyright © Jessica Moore, 2012

We acknowledge the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, and the Ontario Arts Council for their support of our publishing program.

The cover image is a linocut by Jessica Moore.

The interior photographs were taken by Galen Kuellmer and Jessica Moore.

The author photo was taken by Jacques Oulé.

The print edition of the book is set in Minion.

Cover design by Cheryl Dipede.

Brick Books

431 Boler Road, Box 20081

London, Ontario N6K 4G6

www.brickbooks.ca

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Poems about being stranded in a truth that shows no mercy, speaking from the last place you’d ever choose to go.

Part lyric, part memoir, Everything, now, Jessica Moore’s heart-rending debut, describes an untimely death and the journey of going on alone. The book stares down loss and struggles to transform that loss into language that can pass through boundaries of intricate sorrow; the act of translation here is not about two different languages—although Moore uses her own translation of Jean-François Beauchemin’s Turkana Boy as a template for translating death into life, past into present—but about the necessity to put the inexplicable into words that might hint at its intensity.

The fact at the core of Everything, now is the death of Moore’s lover in a sudden, tragic bicycle accident. But rather than simply detail such a catastrophe, Moore strives to bring memory back to full colour. How do we hold on to what totally escapes us? Where does love end and grief begin? Are they one and the same thing in a circumstance such as this?

All quotations in this book are from

the author’s translation of Turkana Boy by

Jean-François Beauchemin (Talonbooks, 2012).

for Galen

Memory is a strange bird

doling out the world in

shards –

the stuff we are made of.

I am the keeper, now,

I hold them all.

Tonight as I write I become conjurer –

when I open my hands:

a thousand sparrows

Was the soul, then, a sky tangled in every person?

Ghosts move through this house

with all the windows

and all the doors open

they move in swathes

ribbons

thin cloth

Spaces we inhabit contain so much –

or rather, allow –

wind and motion,

silk reams blowing,

our own long-drawn souls.

This body is not a closed thing,

not the shell, but a room with windows,

simple vines gathering at the sill.

Come, come to the doorway:

I will show you my yellow room,

unbroken.

·

You wrote: I have fallen, but it feels like

I’m falling up into the wide open blue.

Here is what I believe:

we need to leave a wider space for notions

like love, or the soul.

Call them skies, then.

Come, sit, and I will tell you the story of the skies.

Imagine yourself light as silk

slipping out of the room with windows

and when you reach the end of the path carved out by leaving

someone is there, waiting.

Imagine you’ve gathered ghosts, like stones

or flowers – basket under your arm you walked

between the hulls of searching evenings,

pressed your ear to