Join us as we celebrate the release of Thorpe Moeckel’s new book, Down by the Eno, Down by the Haw. A signing will follow. This event will be free and open to the public.
On foot and in a leaky canoe, award-winning poet and naturalist Thorpe Moeckel meanders for a year through the fragmented forests of the Eno and Haw watersheds. He seeks the alive interiors of a world covered over in asphalt, seeks to shed its hard exterior and “wonder the woods.” In doing so he makes a record both physical and numinous. His writing—lyrical and leapy with cellular, porous perceptiveness—invites readers to journey with him around every surprising bend and twisting turn of phrase. Reading this book is like trying to grasp a live fish or to study the seeds of a jewelweed pod the moment they unfurl: joyful, exhilarating, wakeful, wise, and riddled with each moment’s loss. It orients by disorienting, because how else, Moeckel asks, can being in such an altered, changing, resilient place feel.
"Down by the Eno, Down by the Haw is so rhythmic and rhymed, so riddled with light and webbed with spidery strands of connection, it moves the mind right past the obvious praise—that this prose sounds like poetry—to a stance of truer wonder."
Rose McLarney, author of Forage and Its Day Being Gone
Thorpe Moeckel is the author of a nonfiction book, a middle grade novel, and four books of poems. His work has been widely anthologized and honored with NEA, Javits, Hoyns, Sustainable Arts, and Kenan Fellowships. He teaches at Hollins University.