96 pp, ISBN: 978-1-904130-39-0, £8.99 (paperback only),  
Publication, November 7th 2009

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A note about Shore Ordered Ocean "By turns playful and serious, the poems in Dora Malech's long-awaited second collection, Shore Ordered Ocean, revel in the inherent tensions and pleasures of sense, sound and syntax, reveal the resonance in the offhand utterance, seek the unexpected in aphorism and cliché, and tap into the paradoxical freedom of formality. This is an extraordinary collection of highly idiosyncratic poems which explores place, politics, the body, love, art, and more. It is bound together by an urgent, physical and beguiling relationship with language itself."

A note on Dora Malech Dora Malech was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1981 and grew up in Bethesda, Maryland. She earned a BA in Fine Arts from Yale College in 2003 and an MFA in Poetry from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2005. She has been the recipient of a Frederick M. Clapp Poetry Writing Fellowship from Yale, a Truman Capote Fellowship and a Teaching-Writing Fellowship from the Writers’ Workshop, a Glenn Schaeffer Award in Poetry, and a Writer’s Fellowship at the Civitella Ranieri Center in Umbertide, Italy. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications, including the New Yorker, Poetry, Best New Poets, American Letters & Commentary, Poetry London, and the Yale Review. She has taught writing at the University of Iowa; Victoria University’s International Institute of Modern Letters in Wellington, New Zealand; Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa; and Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois. She lives in Iowa City.

Praise for Shore Ordered Ocean   “These are wonderful poems. Dora Malech knows just about everything there is to know about the risky music that lives in language. But she also knows about Truth and Beauty. She’s far too wise to try and make these last two rhyme, but she constantly tempts them into conversation.” – Bill Manhire “If you’d wondered where the dappled things had gone, how the tisket and tasket ended up, what the fickle, freckled, couple-colored pieces of life were up to, look no further. Dora Malech has woven them into her exuberant debut. And she’s stuck in too the x-rays of Zeus and the horns of Moses. Shore Ordered Ocean is by turns witty and wonderstruck, fragile and fierce. Best of all, it announces an extraordinary talent to be watched and cherished.” – J. D. McClatchy “Inquiring, irreverent, reverent, enraptured, Dora Malech is that rare thing, the magician technician, and she has written a book in which a sudden segue in poetry takes place – from Hopkins to the present. The result is as breathtaking as a dove release. She knows every word in the world is a book, that every center sought and found is continually thrown off, that the muscular is fragile and vice-versa, yet none of her old soul knowledge is ponderous, predictable, or dull, for she remains in love with that essential playfulness which is the innocence of art. Here is Malech on the birth of a child: ‘... unfold all / those origami limbs to test / the inevitable debutante bawl.’ This book is an astonishing debut, one that makes me feel our original, lost language has found its way home.” – Mary Ruefle

From Shore Ordered Ocean   Treasure Hunting   Soon to be a low moon and elsewhere fire. Lucky mountain shone copper but not to pocket. Not that kind of angel between maybe and the blaze. Asked to hold my baby. Didn't envy gravity to lug its chubby moon from under. Dear dire said the radio and oh I was its girl. Called it a silver un-bridge a single listing trestle. Someday sounded the siren of a false all-clear. May I? My skein all un-spun under fire. The spider alive in a primrose. The baby bent to an iris and willing her face to unfurl. I wanted to watch the coupling trains. Had never seen machines in love before. No arrowheads but among ordinary stones red flint from which one had maybe once been broken. The sky streaks with diurnal war paint. Touches on baby's pulse where a dream tries to surface. Touches as the horsemen do (indeed) pass by the monarch in said spider's web where struggles spin to filigree.           A Shortcut A hedgehog shuffles out to take a moment of the moon. The moon leaves off trying on cloud after cloud to render for a moment the frowsy foliage and the nose beneath in tenebrous strokes, not light and dark, but light in dark or light in spite of. Doesn't rinse the brush to touch the lilies' brief white swash and sticky spots of seeds and pulp where the karakas bend and drop their drupes. Sprays of stone-fruit come to sweet rot underfoot with a stench that in a warmer, brighter hour would draw the flies to feed at each smear adhered, here to the asphalt switchback and there to the stairs that teeter through the terraces and past the walls that prop the city up above the sea, walls studded with snails after a day of rain. The young snails resemble pearl barley, pale, scattered as at some strange matrimony, the old are dark burls grown somehow from brick. Egalitarian spectrum renders the memory of the sun's gaudy palette obsolete here where each edge is a glint and each hollow, a shadow. Holds at first glance each as distant and as dear, though an eye that waits to warm to, lets its iris open into finds that though both take a glimmer, the shell knows one way to shine and the body, another. The former's luster, a crystal ball in which one sees the muddy future, the latter, a small brown tongue pronouncing "like" against a concrete palate, careful. Only the wind hurries here, and the leaves turn aside to let it pass, shake disapproval. A spider rests after mending its nets, sits at the center of tenuous nebula wound from catkin to fern frond to the black beaks of the last flax, an almost-still-life. Here a twitch and there a shiver and each snail's nacreous wake belies if not progress then process, illuminated glyphs, transient text, a glisten spelling if not here-to-there then somewhere-to-somewhere by way of these walls that hold the hills from their someday certain spill into the harbor a moment more and then another moment more for each of our small sakes.   ©