We Are In Danger of Drowning by Loren Moreno

The poems of We Are In Danger of Drowning by Loren Moreno intertwine Biblical narrative and contemporary reflection to create an evocative landscape filled with secrets of the ocean, complexities of family history, quests for identity, and reverberations of faith. This chapbook intertwines the story of Jonah with meditations on nature and mankind, delivering visceral, exquisite imagery throughout. “God is the flashlight you held / as you scoured the beach / for your disappeared son— / you called it hope,” we learn in the poem “For Jonah’s Mother,” and later, in “All Those Seagulls,” we are told, “In the mornings when the dead don’t rise / we substitute them / with artificial light.” As these poems send us back into our own memories, they also urge us to revel in the present, and to seek our own astonishing truths.

 –Mary Biddinger, author of Small Enterprise and The Czar

“I am told my heart has a hole,” Loren Moreno writes, but it’s a hole where “sparrows, though, can/ slip through/ and live.” Throughout this debut collection, Moreno proves this permeability—this vulnerability—is a strength, an opening that lets the world in. In the persona of Jonah, he explores his connection to the divine, willing to wait for years inside the whale, “for the sun// to rise at the horizon of its tongue.” In poems shadowed by an absent mother and a disapproving father, he probes the “unreliability of memory” and seeks to discover what has shaped him. Reader, find a quiet stretch of hours, a still place in which to settle and read: Loren Moreno’s We Are In Danger Of Drowning is a gorgeous collection of God-haunted, wave-tossed poems, which catch “that elusive lightning/ hidden away in the crevices of the rocks.”

–Jessica Jacobs, author of Pelvis with Distance and In Whatever Light Left to Us