Carol Moldaw

$Beauty Refracted book cover$

“Earthy in diction, elegant in syntax, Beauty Refracted is a rich, surprising and moving read.”
— Dana Levin

Carol Moldaw is an award-winning American poet and the author, most recently, of Beauty Refracted (Four Way Books). The recipient of a NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and a Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship, she is the author of five other books of poetry. With poems that have been called iridescent, metaphysical and timeless, Moldaw skillfully balances intimacy and objectivity in exact, lyric language.

“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 Tyler Mill’s 2020 interview with Carol in On the Seawall.

Beauty Refracted

Four Way Books

In iridescent, intimate lines, Beauty Refracted is a stunning tapestry of the ways we are marked by time. A rich, surprising and moving read.

So Late, So Soon

Etruscan Press

Out of acutely observed, deeply felt particulars the poems collected here balance intimacy and objectivity in exact, lyric language.

The Widening

Etruscan Press

Moldaw’s acclaimed first novel presents from the inside a portrait of a young woman’s volatile mix of passivity and wildness. This darkly comedic, melancholy book depicts a girl on her way to self-discovery.

The Lightning Field

Oberlin College Press

In her third collection, Moldaw explores new territory in poems that are thematically far-reaching and technically sophisticated. Featuring a central title sequence inspired by Walter De Maria’s land art installation in western New Mexico, The Lightning Field was awarded the FIELD Poetry Prize in 2002.

Through the Window

La Alameda Press

Through the Window was first published in Istanbul in a bilingual edition translated by Nezih Onur. Tracking the arc of feeling with an accuracy as fine as dry point, these are poems that insisted on being written and insist to be read.

Chalkmarks on Stone

La Alameda Press

Here, the world is distilled with a compelling logic from the poet’s home in New Mexico to a Jewish cemetery in Penang. Among the poems is a long, meditative fugue of six-line poems that uses the I Ching to explore what lies beneath the surface of each day.

Taken from the River

Alef Books

Lyrically delicate, the poems in Moldaw’s first book convey an otherworldly dreaminess. Her explorations of tenderness, passion and loss invite us to lift our gaze upward.