Go Figure

Carol Moldaw

In her and her and her I saw myself.In carved sandstone, a voluptuary,my neck coiled to face my back, my backtwisted to pinch and raise for inspectiona small patch of almost-out-of-reach skin.One foot planted, the other on toe,my toes on a narrow ledge high upthe temple’s façade. I’m unfazedby gaze of mason, acolyte, or tourist.And in her, also slightly coiled, risingout of the bath under a painter’s gaze, I sawmyself stepping over the tub’s rim, sidewaysinto the easel like a towel. You call meby the painter’s name: a Lautrec. A Degas.Myself in veined marble, my towel nowdraped like a veil. Or etched, in a notchedcrosshatch illusion of fishnets. Hewnin block, impaneled in canvas, versionssketched, filmed, celluloid, digitized—.Countless iterations find me poisedas if alone at the mirror examining eye,lip, brow: brush and palette in hand.The mirror goes back to grit, a sandthat can’t reflect but absorbs the noon sunI peer up into, as into a museum’s directedand calculated light, as into a church’sperpetual dusk, cinema’s blackout velvet.

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Headshot of Carol Moldaw

Carol Moldaw is the author of seven books of poetry and a novella, most recently Go Figure (Four Way Books, 2024). Other books include Beauty Refracted (2018), So Late, So Soon: New and Selected Poems (2010) and The Widening (2008). Recent poems and essays have appeared in APR, Lana Turner, The New York Review of Book, Poetry, Poetry Society of America’s “In Their Own Words,” and Subtropics. Her poems have been translated into Chinese, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Turkish; a volume of her selected poems translated into Chinese is forthcoming from Guangxi University Press (Beijing) in 2025. She lives in Santa Fe, NM, and teaches privately.

Cover of Go Figure by Carol Moldaw

New York, New York

In Go Figure, Carol Moldaw demonstrates an incandescent mastery of figuration in its many forms. As the title suggests, these poems invite readers to draw their own conclusions. Observing, inquiring, and delving, Moldaw brings the intertwined strands of life and art to light at their most intimate. A wife-muse who interrogates the role, a mother hard-pressed by motherhood, a daughter whose own mother’s decline causes her to probe their connection, and an artist with an exacting eye and ear who contemplates the creative mysteries, Moldaw is driven to understand and articulate the self in all its manifestations. Like a skater cutting first lines in ice, Moldaw displays lyric immediacy and lyric expanse in her poems with an unswerving command. Complex and inviting, with deft wit, the poems engage public and private life and voice a necessary and resounding affirmation of the feminine and of language emerging through silence.

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