Drawing inspiration from her dreamscapes, Southern roots, and the innovative rhythms and structures of Americana music, Lauren Moseley has crafted a sensual and provocative collection of poems that invites us to reevaluate the connection between our inner and outer worlds. Her debut, Big Windows, which Carnegie Mellon University Press released in February of 2018, has surfaced at a time when humanity is confronting an onslaught of social unrest, political upheaval, and aesthetic bankruptcy that often distracts us from the ecstasy we might otherwise find by tuning into our immediate environment. Each poem in this collection is a progression through the stages of disillusionment, humility, wonder, and ultimately, enlightenment.

Moseley’s writing challenges readers to reinstate the practice of observing what the French writer, George Perec, refers to as, the infraordinary—the seemingly trivial and yet intrinsically beautiful objects and events of the everyday. She brings us to an important threshold, beyond which the boundaries of our interior landscape and those of the world that takes shape outside our minds merge and, in so doing, collapse the distance between our dreams and our reality.

From wrestling with the irrational mechanics of love to embracing the sanctity of her rich inner world, the speaker of these poems moves through several rights of passage that deliver her from feelings of powerlessness to a place of agency. In “Romance,” the speaker emerges in a world that has been transformed by love—a world in which she is convinced that she can manifest the impossible, and yet finds herself unable to materialize her desires:

I am drawn to the window as if it were a fire.
The house rattles a quarter hour, then clouds
cool their engines and streets steam
in abrupt sunlight. Hailstones cover the grass
like clover. 

. . . 

Heat and ice. Earth and sky. Stop saying why
I can’t have both. I saw them together.
I almost had them.

As the collection’s opening poem, it demonstrates Moseley’s exceptional use of surreal and vivid imagery, as well as her ability to encapsulate a universal frustration that human beings encounter when they discover they can neither dictate nor grab hold of love’s reigns. To move beyond our disappointment, we must become humble and recognize the absolute perfection that permeates even the seemingly inane and insignificant aspects of ourselves and our journeys.

In “Before Prayer,” the speaker begins to tap into the kind of humility that makes wonder, awe, and innocence possible again. Shifting away from any resistance to her circumstances, she accepts the universe and shows reverence for her lot in life:

Once, God was the thread connecting all things:
nebulae, antelope, earthquakes, workers.
Then the string snapped. A child
wailed, my debt grew, a film settled
over my eyes. An ordinary day. 

… 

It is real, this hollow inside me.
I kneel.

The intense pathos contained within these lines is an element that Moseley consistently weaves into each installment of this collection. This feeling gives the reader pause, demands that they penetrate their own inner world until they land on that same hollowness, and invites them to genuflect before the essence of who they are. By embracing the kind of humility the speaker displays in this poem, every thought or deed we carry out in this life becomes a benediction, or a prayer. We release ourselves from feelings of separation, loss, and helplessness and advance towards awe, gratitude, and wonder.

As the speaker surrenders to inner transformation, her dreams come to the fore and serve as tools for self-discovery, self-mastery, and self-determination. In “Disobedience / is the first right of being alive,” she abandons her sapless past and blossoms forth as mystical and multidimensional—never to be the same:

I dive off the rocks and swim deeper
until the pressure
beats inside my human skin.
When I rise and break the surface,
my lungs expand like wings.

Here, the speaker forgoes her fear of what she might become and allows the life force at work within her being not only to breathe, but to also take flight. The interplay between elements in nature that feature in this poem—a line of ash trees,/ the dry creek bed, scrub forest,/ hollows without their owls—and the speaker’s psyche reveals the intimate relationship between her inner and outer worlds. Just as everything in nature happens in its own time, the speaker comes into her own at the precise moment her transformation is required. She starts to become, on an inner level, the beauty that she sees in the world around her.

With this transformation, there comes a massive shift in the speaker’s tone and voice. It seems the power she has accessed has left her with a sense of invincibility that surfaces during an imagined confrontation with the devil in “The Sound I’ll Make”:

[The sound I’ll make]
when I meet the devil will break the backs of bees. I’ll say, Let the clatter come,
and it will be so.

In these lines, the speaker asserts a kind of biblical authority and influence over the forces of darkness and evil. She assigns herself the power to set in motion all manner of ruckus and commotion, which she implies would disarm the devil himself and put him in his place:

Hound muzzle digging in fur, tongue at new wound, and down the avenue
sewers flood, churn, spill airplane bottles, dolls’ heads, and dominoes.

… 

slicing pruning shears, crackling toe joints and twigs, birled logs
down the pile, a mile of starlings muttering to themselves. But no sound
summoned will match the cat-gut strings, the singing claws, the horse’s hair aflame.
Voice of my flesh crying up from the ground: a beat as soft as the beast himself.

The sardonic tone in this poem creates an incendiary tension in the collection. It is a tension that pits good against evil, strength against weakness, and confinement against liberation. Suddenly self-aware and in touch with her true worth, the speaker becomes a threat to any body, system, or idea that serves to limit what she can become—which is everything.

At this point, the speaker has survived the journey from disillusionment to humility to wonder. She has come to recognize her intrinsic value. In her dreams she sees her own expansion and achieves freedom from a life of triviality. With her imagination unhinged and the borders between her inner and outer worlds dissolved, the speaker enters into a new, sophisticated romance—this time, without needing to control the experience. Instead, she surrenders to the shape her environment takes, knowing that everything she sees is sacred—knowing that everything within and without is in tune.

In the final poem of this collection, “Thanks Be to Big Windows,” the speaker relaxes into a softer, more receptive, and yet still remarkably empowered space. She names what she sees, and what she sees, she becomes:

Winter vegetables
on the windowsills 

glass drawing lines
between warmth and cold 

rottings and ripenings 

… 

branches ink-black in silhouette
the writing spider’s finished web 

… 

when I woke up in the morning
I knew exactly what I was

In the act of observing a thing, we do not simply validate its existence. Rather, we become a participant, an agent, or a catalyst in its evolution. The distance between what we are and what we see outside of us disappears, until we become what we observe—the vegetables, the windowsill, panes of glass, life in its beginning stages and life that has begun to decay, the trees in view, the spider spinning its web—everything. Thanks be to the windows that we see through clearly, and thanks be to the beauty we become when we release ourselves from the illusion of separation. Moseley shows us that in moments when our inner and outer worlds are in sync—when we perceive the extraordinary at work within the ordinary—we grab hold of heat and ice, Earth and sky at once. We can imagine the impossible—and also have it.

– Jules Henderson