Experiment Books, 2019

Winner of the Foreword INDIES Award in Silver, Essays (Adult Nonfiction)

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“The cumulative sum of these stories is an enlightening reading experience for both those who’ve had C-sections and those who may.”—Publishers Weekly

“Women have always been able to find narrative stories that explore vaginal birth. But what about books that just talk about what happens during C-Section and shortly after? [This] new book takes a thoughtful approach and explores a diverse lens of stories.”—Mama Glow

“The C-section experience is as varied as life itself—there’s guilt and gratitude, pride and regret. These mothers illuminate the whole spectrum with depth, urgency, and humor. My Caesarean is the antidote to alienation, and I dearly wish I’d had it before my own births. I’m so glad we have it now.”—Meaghan O’Connell

“The essays in My Caesarean refuse to idealize the birth experience, and show it in all its stunning unexpectedness. This is a beautiful and important book that should be prominently shelved in the birth and parenting section of every bookstore.” —Julie Schumacher

“This collection gathers the overlooked and underprocessed experiences of C-sections—each importantly different, each importantly the same—and prompts robust reflection. Together these voices create a much-needed community which will comfort and challenge, enlighten and affirm. ” —Beth Ann Fennelly

Lost Roads Press, 2017

Winner of the Besmilr Brigham Award

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“Rachel Moritz’s poems are a presence, and in being so they reflect all that is absent from them. Absorbed by their language and their mystery, I think of Wallace Stevens who writes about the “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” As Moritz writes, this is the magic of poetry: Something transparent,/we know,/still contains.” In Sweet Velocity, the nothing that is appear as footnotes that act the way light does when casting a shadow: people, reflections, and observations appear, cohering at thresholds but not fully coming into view. There are silhouettes of a mother, a child. And there is everything else that comes into these poems as the space that surrounds them. Moritz’s poems are exquisitely crafted reminders that our inner self is a “figment of making.” There is such sweet velocity in following how her figments subtly transform through the lines of her language, which seem to mark and erase at the same time. Exquisite! ” — Kirstin Prevallet

“We know ourselves / by serration.­” Rachel Moritz’s powerfully sweet Sweet Velocity delivers a lived-in world—material, object-oriented and also lyrically distinctive. The song here treats a serene, sometimes bemused, engagement with life passages—the essentials of coming into and going out of the world, of bringing about and of letting go. But Moritz’s song, like the Dickinsonian one, also abrades the conventions it observes. Poetry is the result. An eccentric system. “[S]tops of flow before the animal.” —Aaron McCollough

“Sensory in internal reflection, Rachel Moritz’s Sweet Velocity traces the transformation of
woman to mother with a focused delicacy that is at once blunt and tender. We see one identity in continual erosion (“my earlier self/stitched across some light fuse/while it closes”) as two new identities emerge, within herself and in her son (“so I mother a form/into pants, jacket, hat”). She examines the blurred interchange of desire and loss as the painful and confusing essence of change. Her quiet and careful voice moves boldly into her existence parallel to her son’s “future taking form/in our next room,” recognizing that “this world is brutal//or rather, evolutionary.” Moritz testifies to the intimate and exhaustive curiosity which breeds love of self and others.” — Matt Henriksen

Kore Press, 2015

Finalist for the National Poetry Series and the Minnesota Book Award

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“Book of memory, of metaphysics, of intimacy and of sex, book of selfhood and place, Borrowed Wave travels from childhood landscapes into adulthood’s uncertain territory, each of its poems ‘visceral as/becoming is.’ Syntax is the protagonist of these poems, a singular intelligence singing its way through the vicissitudes of coming to know itself in body and in thought. ‘The soul is real,’ Moritz writes, ‘but what does she want?’ This book embodies the canny paradox that the more we come to know ourselves as adults, the more the essential questions of Being deepen. ‘In love with making an unknown thing,’ Moritz has a remarkable, rare gift for bare narratives whose restraint and abstraction allow the things we think we’ve come to know to become unknown again, so we might know them more accurately in all their weird oblique beauty.” —Brian Teare

“We sometimes view beauty with suspicion—how does the pleasure it affords seduce us, mislead us? The startling beauty of Rachel Moritz’s poems serves a different purpose. This beauty spatializes experience as an exquisite, if partially remembered—wavering—landscape. In that way, Moritz employs the beautiful as a tool that teaches us to be suspicious of time, space, and experience. (“So you can believe in the past, but it is still deciding.”) The reader wanders this poetry, immersed in the poet’s quandaries: “Who were you waiting for before you came?” and “Where was my body when before/hadn’t vanished?” The questions are necessarily inconclusive. Even so, Moritz pursues with patience, skill, ardor. The Borrowed Wave laps at our feet, soothing. And then it swells and overtakes us.” —Elizabeth Robinson

“The poet here reports on a world borrowed and remembered, yet still unmade—‘unmade as wilderness.’ In her thinking and in her telling, Rachel Moritz sets the reader on a pilgrimage, moving out of both shared and individual history and out of belief. The landmarks of politics and family and understanding are refracted and reframed in her thinking and in her telling. If you hold onto your breath, you’ll find yourself in a place of new meaning. That world is filled with song. This book is wondrous and heartbreaking.” —G.E. Patterson