Using Your Words

In poems that sparkle with insight, caring, and humor, Laura Rogerson Moore’s intimate and energetic portrayal of three generations of women from the same family brings the reader on a journey of reflection, frustration, and ultimately, love. Stepping into Using Your Words is like stepping into one’s own life. For any age, this generous gathering of free verse grabs the heart and doesn’t let go.

—Mimi Baird, He Wanted the Moon, The Madness and Medical Genius of Dr. Perry Baird and His Daughter’s Quest to Know Him

In this poignant collection, Laura Rogerson Moore gives us new insight into the title phrase, with its echoes at once of a writer’s mantra and a childhood admonition. These raw, honest poems present a history of becoming fully oneself, rather than “somebody/else’s idea of somebody else.” As Moore guides us through a landscape of memory, striving to gain control over a body, and, as a consequence, a life, she reveals the unplumbed depths of feeling in both the everyday and the layers of the past.

—Susan Edwards Richmond, Before We Were Birds, Purgatory Chasm, and Boto

Our most profound emotions are felt in the medulla, the region of the brain that conjures consciousness; that makes us alive, awake, and aware. In Using Your Words, Moore reaffirms the notion that only by finding these feelings can we fully live. Not just bodies, but bodies with minds that feel and make meaning, the three generations of women in these poems spanning the past fifty years engage in the painful, effortful, and exhilarating process of learning how to feel, to notice, and to recognize a call to action, finally living their lives like they mean them.

—Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, University of Southern California, Emotions, Learning, and the Brain

Laura Rogerson Moore has lived and worked in Groton, Massachusetts, for most of her life. In 2010, Finishing Line Press published her chapbook Yahoodips.