Alyssa N. Moore, Come Again?

 

The Light

The light comes in the middle of the night to wake me
And I am too full of noise to receive it 

Notably, I fear
The modulating quality of the light 

Which reminds me of a closet I was once stuck in
Extra-closet light filtering in through a little crack in the door 

Hitting the sequins on a ball gown and becoming to me
A beacon of my condition & every light since echoes it 

Pity that who I was always stands slightly ahead of
Who I will be eclipsing my view and with first dibs on perception 

Takes the chance to lob back towards me
Fantastic interpretations of each new moment

Having caught some of her work via The Volta back in 2020, it is good to see a full-length debut by American poet Alyssa N. Moore, the absolutely remarkable Come Again? (Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 2026). Comparable to recent works by Meredith Stricker [see my review of her latest here] and Ellen Chang-Richardson [see my review of their debut here], Come Again? showcases a poet working the lyric across a visual field, from handwritten notes, collaged and set text overlaid across a field of what might appear relatively standard text lyric but is anything but, offering instead a rich multiplicity of image, sound and structure. As The Cyborg Jillian Weise offers to open their back cover quote: “Poetry fundamentally changed in 2019, when Moore published two poems.” Quite a statement, to be sure, but I’m not finding myself disagreeing in any way. “The worst thing I did was sleep / with the president.” begins the poem “impulse controls,” a piece that offers, further down: “I should have focused on my motility // or that diorama to feed my pets under the table or // been born a winter animal. Friends, / the president stopped watching porn for me. I never looked // any of the white house aides in the eye / but I read all of their correspondence. // Revel in who you are not, then / hold your enemies closer.”

Come Again? is structured via an array of sections and subsections; with three main sections: “THE VOLUNTEER,” with the poem “My Week as Eternal Counselor”; “THE STREETCLEANER,” with a cluster of nine pieces; and “THE ARCHITECT,” with two poems: “The Beginning of Character” and “The Architect”; before a final, standalone poem, “Translocation.” Moore revels in fragments and lines that stretch at and push at the boundaries of the printed page; are scattered, upside down (in counterpoint, to text set right-side up), crossed out, overlaid, handwritten and collaged. “In the seventh hour I extract / a wooden thimble from the / compressed field of my / palm.” writes the collage-poem “In the seventh hour,” a piece that stretches across the length and width of the printed page. It can be difficult to get a sense of the effect without seeing it, these pieces truly are delightful, which include Moore’s more deceptively straightforwardly-narrative stretches, the loosely-paired poems “the streetcleaner can love their job for a while” and “the streetcleaner adjusts their position.” The poems accumulate, and turn and twist into almost surreal directions, held to the central core of the poem’s premise. The first of these two poems mentioned, for example, begins:

It was my third year in the position, and there
were some things I despised, some things I
yearned for, but all things I endured. My job
consisted mainly of selectively extracting
the dead flower petals from the post-midnight
street detritus and compacting them into a fine-
smelling soot using only the tips of my index
and thumb. I had an inkling it as all bullshit,
the sort of extraneous task assigned when what
exactly to do with a willing body was not known,
but now and again I saw a glimmer of appreciation
from the observers, and so I continued my diligent work.