ABOUT CAROL’S WORK

“Several different forms of maturity — emotional, artistic, religious — come together in Moldaw’s poems, which repeatedly achieve lyric junctures of shivering beauty. Her vision is like that of a seasoned naturalist observing the play of life’s impulses over the crust of the earth.”
—The New Yorker

Read Carol’s conversation with Sheng Yu, translator of Go Figure and other poems.

Watch Carol read at the 2021 International Poets & Writers Conclave.

Hear Carol read her poem “Struck Dumb” via Subtropics.

Read Tyler Mills’s 2020 interview with Carol in On the Seawall. 

Carol Moldaw is an American poet and the author of seven books of poetry including Go Figure (Four Way Books, 2024) and Beauty Refracted (Four Way Books, 2018). The recipient of an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and a Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship, she lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Go Figure is available
from Four Way Books!

EXCERPTS FROM REVIEWS OF GO FIGURE

"The fierceness of the love in these poems, and the lithe music of it, is part of what makes them powerful. Love for a child, love for dying elders, love for the burning world where ‘Bear scat gums the long grass,’ where ‘the apricot bears fruit,’ a world where ‘inside windswept is wept.’ Part of the moral fire in the work is environmentally minded. Part of it is addressed to a sexist literary and artistic world. And the strange beauty of these poems is in the ease of the forms . . . "
—Jesse Nathan’s Short Conversations with
Poets at McSweeney’s

“Go Figure, Carol Moldaw’s seventh poetry collection, displays the painterly eye and lively intellect her readers have come to expect. Pointedly, the deceptively simple expression go figure reads as both bemused wonder and hands-thrown up wtf frustration…In a voice both graceful and searing, Moldaw continues to explore the interior world and the global, especially with regard to women. Longtime readers will recognize her interest in art and nature, but in this collection will also encounter poems that reflect our politically fraught times…The titular poem of Go Figure muses upon the role of woman as muse …Following several more depictions of the contortions required of the female model in the name of Art, the speaker turns to the viewer of these artworks … direct address heightens the poem’s tension and links the poem to the world beyond art.  The poet discovers, buried inside of this formidable figure, the quiet/needed to summon the fury//needed to catapult you over. These lines may be read as an ars poetica for the characteristic poise-and-spring of Moldaw’s poems. Further ahead, these lines will lead to a stunning insight: the Olmec sculpture evokes televised figures of refugees crossing the southern border into the United States … In Go Figure Moldaw extends her impressive reach.”
—Suzanne Cleary, Asheville Poetry Review