Winner of the 2022 Orison Chapbook Prize, Passage: An Essay unfolds over the course of a single day, charting the many passages of that day: civil dawn to astronomical dusk, one harbor to another, one decade to the next, present circumstance to distant memory, external landscape to internal obsessions. Ultimately, it tells the story of a mind trying to understand itself.
Orison Press, forthcoming in 2025 | MORE INFORMATION
Advance Praise for Passage: An Essay
“Passage is a book that lingers. Softly moving between stunning imagery and heartfelt storytelling, every line offers itself to opening the eyes and hearts of readers. Full of rich detail and stunning line level construction, this is a book meant to be savored and returned to time and again.” — Athena Dixon, author of The Loneliness Files
“‘Do I defeat myself at the outset? Or do I create myself?’ is the inquiring heart of Ellene Glenn Moore’s Passage, a long-form lyric essay that reckons with memory, mortality, marriage, and motherhood. The precision of Moore’s language, the sophistication of her thought, and the honesty of her self-inspection put me in mind of some of my favorite essayists-qua-philosophers, including Lia Purpura and David Foster Wallace. Set on a single day aboard a sailing ship in New England—the day, in fact, of Moore’s thirtieth birthday—readers will marvel at the landscapes both witnessed and plumbed. […] Passage is a triumph of eye and mind.” — Julie Marie Wade, author of Otherwise: Essays
Winner of the 2020 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, How Blood Works considers the way identity takes shape in the spaces we inhabit. Often borrowing from and responding to the world of visual art, these poems examine the idea of bloodline, of familial ties, and the traumas, secrets, and complex relationships passed from one generation to the next.
Kent State University Press, ISBN: 9781606354278 | PURCHASE HERE
Praise for How Blood Works
“What clearly set Moore’s winning manuscript apart from the other contenders came to bear on a single word: trope—that often elusive yet essential quality of a collection that forms its elemental arc, a metaphorical spine that holds it together, and elevates a work, transforming it into something transcendent. — Richard Blanco, Judge & Inaugural Poet
“These remarkable poems have an integrity of substance grounded in precise detail; each word in each line deserves careful scrutiny. Moore explores the difficult territory of all that we cannot explain yet must embrace.” — Jim Daniels, author of Gun/Shy
“[Moore] examines incident and narrative from different angles, trying to get to the bottom of something essential, but elusive, about the past [… which emerges] from that dark place incarnate in this luminous debut.” — Peg Boyers, author of To Forget Venice
Runner-up to the 2016 Hopper Chapbook Prize, The Dark Edge of the Bluff engages with the mutable nature of memory and its instantiations: memory as artifact, memory as place, memory as story, memory as compulsion. This poetry collection grapples with the simultaneity of memory as an act of self-preservation, self-creation, and relentless re-creation.
Green Writers Press, ISBN: 0998260452 | PURCHASE HERE
Praise for The Dark Edge of the Bluff
“Ellene Glenn Moore’s The Dark Edge of the Bluff collects wonderfully whirling, watery poems that dive into dark oceans always surfacing to dazzling light. Moore’s imaginative force travels the world (particularly the natural world), illuminating love, familial ties, and distance. Her meditations on human connection, her lyricism and grace, her precision and astonishment make The Dark Edge of the Bluff a welcome debut.” — Denise Duhamel, author of Scald
“Think of Emily Dickinson with a passport and you’ll get a hint of what Ellene Glenn Moore’s poems are like as they take you from a New Orleans bike shop to a temple in southern Italy, from Florida’s shores to backwoods Georgia, from childhood to the present day. It’s no surprise that one of them is called ‘Meditation on Distance,’ but this lovely, luminous collection is a meditation on intimacy as well, on the world as a portal through which we pass on the way to our truest hearts.” — David Kirby, author of Talking about Movies with Jesus