F-Stein - L.J. Moore

Praise for F-Stein

L.J. Moore has written an ingenious, magical, and profound book that crosses a riveting personal and family history with science, history, linguistics, Gnosticism, the movie Edward Scissorhands, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which lends the book its title. Anagrams of that famous name appear as subtitles and offer clues to events so powerful they refuse to be spoken directly. Numerous clues leading to this secret have been dropped along the forest path of reading: homophones, double meanings, and a delightful, allusive style: "from my pink springs / the red and the white...I've been dressing in pink / but my bones are read / and my meat is white." This is one of the most original books of poetry that l've ever encoun-tered, to be read like a detective novel but remembered for its emotional intelligence and command of the facts. Reader, you're in for it now.

~ PAUL HOOVER

Built from the runoff of pop culture spliced with resurrected familial history and electrified by anagrammatic hijinks, L.J. Moore's F-Stein reanimates the shape of the book. Here is a serial poem in which the recto-verso division highlights the mind's oscillation between information gathering and creative impulse: musically-driven, memory-drenched lines meet internet-heavy notes and nods. Who knew occluded attention could be so generative? Oh my goth! Oh go myth! What a beautiful monster!

~ NOAH ELI GORDON