Broken and Blended: Love's Alchemy

In Broken and Blended, Harry Moore provides a story arc moving from deep and grinding loss toward healing and regeneration, all with the awareness that life is forever in flux. The poems move from knowledge gained in Eden through a painful divorce which leaves the poet "weeping into the light falling heavily /once or twice on the lumpy ground" he cannot see. Subsequent sections address times to "embrace," "heal," "build up," "dance," and finally "a time for peace." We meet the poet's children, his stepchildren, his wife, all portrayed through an honest lens that accommodates the flaws and imperfections of our existence. In the end, the poet assures that, although life is "pending, provisional, tentative," its alchemy works magic-pain, grief, loss coalesce into a fully experienced life and love, remembered on the page.

-Nancy Owen Nelson, Author of My Heart Wears No Colors and Portals: A Memoir in Verse

It is easy to praise these poems for their skillful construction, their precise imagery, the way form finds its right way to shape the telling of these stories-but what I respond most directly to is the rich humanity of Moore's vision. Marriages, children, grandchildren, and the process of living a life and aging into some kind of wisdom (or at the very least self-knowledge) make up the subject matter of Broken and Blended, and at the heart of Moore's explorations is what it means to be a man in relationship with others. The imperfect, important work of love shines through, and it gives all of us-however broken or blended or mended-hope.

-Jennifer Horne, Alabama Poet Laureate, Author of Bottle Tree, Little Wanderer, and Borrowed Light

Broken and Blended offers a fresh, contemporary version of an old, familiar story, with its seasons of loss and gain, joy and sorrow, errancy and renewal. In richly allusive, clear, and conversational language, Harry Moore tells this story of love's transformations with humor, affection and wry self-awareness, from the point of view of a husband, father, step-father, and grandfather who feels deeply and sometimes "'think[s] too much.'" Beautifully and subtly well-crafted, the poems' rhythmic cadences, wordplay, apt metaphors and at times surprising twists draw the reader into this engaging narrator's world and state of mind. Do we control the narrative, or does the story-our biology, gender, raising, circumstance-control us? Broken and Blended implicitly asks these questions, even as it affirms that "We must be able to say what / happened," that "This is how we know."

-Susan Luther, Author of Breathing in the Dark, Greatest Hits, and other chapbooks