Flat Land

In her debut and final collection, Marilyn K. Moody's Gothic sensibility delivers mystery as it brings the reader into a complex and dangerous Midwestern landscape. Unique to this work is the way Moody portrays the child's point of view. Flat Land is a construct of extremes: heat and cold, silence and sound, abundance and poverty. The trauma of the family looms despite its many caregivers: mother, father, siblings, friends, uncles, and aunts. Filled with organic imagery-mourning doves, quail, corn fields, lady bugs, wind, and snow-the world of these poems holds an endearing child who remains isolated: "I smell the sweet tobacco from where I sit alone on the old swing set." (Red Metal Lawn Chairs). Ultimately, Flat Land asks the reader to redefine the meaning of home long after she's left it.

-Judith Skillman

Marilyn K. Moody's Flat Land is the epitome of holding a deep sense of poetic place. Her work allows us to enter the lives of a constellation of people living on the Illinois prairie. Marilyn's poems transport the reader into a sometimes surprising and not so simple rural Midwestern world. Embedded in the poems is a shifting "I" as we go in and out of people's stories and experiences. Organic imagery such as mourning doves and quails, fields and tractors, sounds and silence, and the deeply bitter cold thread the manuscript. Flat Land asks us what the larger meaning of "home" is while preserving an intimate focus on the individual. It's a joy to sit in each poem, and an honor to know Marilyn through her work.

- HR Hegnauer

In Flat Land, poet Marilyn K. Moody invites us into family and community, farmhouse and car rides, and the wide open spaces and secret hiding places of rural Illinois. Reading each poem is a walk with the poet as Moody introduces us to landscapes of love, loss, and at times wry amusement, emotional landscapes that are anything but flat. As poems gently unwind, we become witnesses: the hopelessness of crop failure and rents, child joys of tractor or birthday cake, jagged edges of domestic violence, bird chatter, memories in the cemetery, adolescent ennui of night-driving looking for something or someone, and the lives of Charlie the cat. Along this walk, Moody's poems unfold an evolving self and growing wisdom about the intertwining of home and self. Of memory and homeplace, Moody writes, the sounds "will not disappear, embedded/in bone and breath," and at the end, "pines beckon, corn leaves embrace/the mourning doves, the doves/ still call and call." (Memory Sounds)

-Mary Kay Delaney