Every Small Breeze

The poems in Marjorie Moorhead's Every Small Breeze are attuned to weather and seasons, both those in the concrete world and in each person's interior realm. As I spend time with these poems, I feel in the presence of a friend who takes me with her on a walk through grief and its antidote. "Make sure to crane my neck, raise my gaze," she instructs herself, "notice, locate, love." This is a human and humane collection which carries us into emptiness but directs us toward joy.

-Diane Seuss

Marjorie Moorhead's poems reveal a striking intimacy with the world around us, and are grounding in the most literal sense of that word: they bring us back to the body and its rightful place in nature. As she writes so wisely, "Relationship with land can be just a road/claimed with each footstep." Reading these poems, we feel the physicality of that claim, and a call from Moorhead to savor all the priceless "small moments" that come our way, even as storms press in from every side.

-James Crews

In Every Small Breeze, Marjorie Moorhead offers the reader an ode to the sacredness of bearing witness to small things: sumac, purple asters, chickadees, birds gathering at the feeder, falling acorns. Bringing forth smells and rhythms through close attention to nature, these poems chronicle how the poet continually finds a way to live within adversity. And though the reader knows she lives with HIV, the poems barely mention the word itself. Instead, they offer everyday tools, small moments that add up to a "death sentence amended," as the "countless ways this virus steered" her pathway. The poems comprising her "coronavirus diary entries" are strewn with fears of death, but also bring forth the ordinary miracle of being alive. And throughout, small things echo larger ones: how a bruise from a blood draw recalls tracks of the past; the stunning way harsh raindrops evoke bullets in both sound and form; how falling leaves and changing seasons mark a life.

-Risa Denenberg

Marjorie Moorhead's poems reveal a lively mind, conjuring images, touching on yearnings, injustices, and hope, steadily inviting us to sense the natural world with clarity, grappling with the randomness of survival, and grieving what is beyond our control. As facilitator of a women's writing circle, what a pleasure it was to find I'd been witnessing the creative process of a poet who will hopefully gift us with quietly powerful and insightful poems for years to come.

-Pamela Broadley