Bear to Look

Ryan Teitman dives into Rosalie Moffett’s new collection of poems, “Making a Living.”

By Ryan TeitmanMay 25, 2025

• Poetry

WHILE ROSALIE MOFFETT’S previous collection of poems, Nervous System (2019), was symphonic—braiding science, the natural world, grief, memory, and family together into a single, dynamic, cohesive composition—her latest book, Making a Living (2025), is like a concerto in which capitalism is the soloist, and everything else the orchestra. In Moffett’s poems, just like life, no matter what we’re doing—surfing the internet, teaching creative writing to students, or having a baby—capitalism is there, center stage, interjecting its baroque melody into every aspect of our existence.

The collection’s opening poem, “Resolution,” lays out the collection’s guiding premise. On a cold morning with the “Dollar General employees / at work in their carbon / footprint nightmare,” the speaker is bombarded with images of fires in Australia, news about children being held in cages at the border, and updates on other tragedies via her smartphone, all as she and her husband have just decided to have a baby. She remembers, in the midst of that storm of images:

         […] My husband may still fear hell
     but the idea was never anything
         but comical to me—some other place
     to suffer?

To the speaker of the poem, hell isn’t other people, as Sartre wrote; hell is everyone’s current address. Later, as the speaker searches for baby monitors on her phone amid the despair being digitally fed to her, she asks, “Who can bear / to look at the world?”

The question isn’t answered in the poem, because Moffett knows it needs to be us, for the sole reason that we’re the ones who are here. But Making a Living isn’t about how capitalism stinks, though it’s clear from the poems that it does. The book is about how we navigate our lives through it. It’s about the counterpoint we play as it tries to overpower us, and how even our own small and subtle melodies can create space for living.

We get a glimpse of this kind of space in one of the collection’s early poems, “Forsythia.” The speaker opens the poem with the titular plant’s role in her memories:

     [Forsythia] will forever remind me
         of my mother stealing
     branches of it outside the DoubleTree Inn
         in Murfreesboro, Tennessee
     for her mother’s funeral.

In the poem, Moffett sets these stolen branches of forsythia against the litany of storefronts here on the strip mall side of town: the Starbucks, the OfficeMax, the Ruby Tuesday. As the speaker contemplates the “bland middle swath of [her] life,” she wonders “what [she]’ll pilfer for [her] own mother’s ceremony. / Her own purple irises, perhaps.” The poem concludes with the speaker imagining that very moment “in which a child watches [her] scavenge / the landscape for bits of beauty, / learns how to do it herself.”

That child could be the speaker’s, or it could be just an observant child following her curiosity past the OfficeMax and Ruby Tuesday. But Moffett has shown us the lineage of those small “bits of beauty,” from the branches plucked from plants on the property of a chain hotel to the flowers that the speaker will surreptitiously procure one day and the child who will, years later, do the same. That inheritance, the passing-down of beauty outside the reach of the world of commerce, will still happen, even among the cinder blocks and signage of a Tennessee strip mall.

And that new generation is something the speaker of the book is deeply invested in. Throughout the collection, we follow her as she goes through the various medical procedures involved in having a baby—and we see her both observing and being bodily affected by how thoroughly capitalism has insinuated itself into her care. Even the small things reflect how seldom she is regarded as a person with a body rather than a future payment from the insurance company—when she goes into the room for a procedure, there’s nowhere to put her coat or clothes.

In “Making a Living” (the first of three poems in the book with that title), she describes a prenatal appointment with her “heels in the stirrups and on the stirrups / little socks advertising Enfamil.” After this moment of captive advertising, she is given an ultrasound, and worries about her bank account push their way into her mind, even as she considers the interior of her own body.

The intertwining of chilly free-market economics and the process of having a child continues throughout the book. Toward the end of the collection, in “Redeem,” the moment has come—the speaker is in the labor and delivery ward getting ready to give birth. But as a nurse scans her in, she is moved through the healthcare system with the same amount of thoughtful concern that a box of mac and cheese receives on the conveyor belt at the grocery store:

     I lifted my plastic bracelet to the green eye
     of the barcode gun and it sang

     the first note
     of money’s national anthem.

Throughout the speaker’s stay in the hospital, every moment of care becomes a transaction:

     […] Each Tylenol,
     a tiny egg in the nest

     of the nurse’s cupped hand,
     rematerialized weeks later

     on the itemized bill.

And while the process of bringing a new human into the world has become monetized and dehumanized for the speaker, we also see an example of the kind of descriptions from Moffett that, throughout the collection, hit like expertly thrown darts. Those striking images, like the pill as “a tiny egg in the nest // of the nurse’s cupped hand,” or the speaker holding her body “like a pen / poised over a check” (“Total Liability”), remind us, like the stolen forsythia, that beauty can thrive outside of money and markets.

One of the things that struck me about Moffett’s poems is that her speaker actually worries about her bank account, 401(k) plan, and mortgage payments. She has a job teaching writing at a university. And her anxieties about money permeate her descriptions throughout the book. In “Total Liability,” even the natural world gets the framework of commerce foisted upon it:

     […] I assume
     each day, the sun, a wholesale retailer in the solar
     pyramid scheme, releases some luminescence
     to the down-line distributors.

Viewing everything through a market lens is a difficult habit to shake when it seems like even the sun is exploitative.

Poetry feels like a particularly incisive genre for the critique of capitalism because—for most poets—the most financial gain they’re anticipating is $25 and two contributor copies. (It was Robert Graves who famously said, “There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money, either.”) Without the dream of financial reward, poets have the relative freedom, if not to throw a wrench in the gears of the system, then at least to point vigorously at what it’s grinding up. I think often of “The Bob Hope Poem” from Campbell McGrath’s Spring Comes to Chicago (1996), a six-part behemoth of a poem that musters up everything it can get its hands on—block quotes from Marx, Darwin, and Whitman; takeout menus and evangelical pamphlets; histories of empire from around the world—in a riotous, swaggering broadside against the pirate ship that is capitalism.

Moffett’s poems, on the other hand, aren’t cannon blasts; they’re scalpels. What she’s attempting—and accomplishing—is to use the sharpness of her language to immerse us in the unease of navigating our present moment. And in that unease, we can recognize the beauty, not of the ideology that’s working on us day and night, but of everything else. A mother’s purple irises. A shoreline glowing with phosphorescent plankton. A woman holding a newborn, wondering if a window “imagines / it has made / what it holds.”

Those things won’t save us, or free us, or fix us, but they can help us orchestrate the lives we hope to live. The poems in Making a Living are ones of both praise and lament. They create a space for us to step into. And they don’t just ask who can bear to look at the world—they also ask how we can bear to look at the world. Then they answer: how can we not?