Book Review: Threadbare: A Patchwork of Poems that Make a Life by Adanna Moriarty

Threadbare: A Patchwork of Poems that Make a Life is forthcoming from Curious Corvid Publishing, January 2022.

“I am here to tell a story,” Moriarty’s incipit reads. Indeed, the story is told, not only through her collection of poems, but with personal photographs from her life weaved together to form this “Patchwork” book.

Written almost entirely in first person, the collection reads like a memoir, taking the reader on a journey from red, curly-haired child, to angsty runaway, to multipotentialite adult who seems to have lived countless lives in her 40 some-odd years.

Her poem, “Drowned,” in the first section of her collection, serves as a sort of foreshadowing to the rest of the collection.

I saved myself
not when I drowned
the first time
when I was five…
But when I drowned again
I was twelve
I swam
gulped
grasped at each
particle of air…
my face breaking the plane of one
world to the other
in those first, small
purposeful
still and quiet breaths
I saved myself.