All the Men I Never Married

Kim Moore’s All the Men I Never Married chronicles the poet’s interactions with men from childhood to adulthood—on the playground, in a club, at the pool, in dreams, in bed. Her collage of masculinities in their most cringy, violent, and empathetic forms, has the surreal effect of rendering masculinity both creaturely and formulaic. There are times when what happens in a given encounter feels unpredictable until, of course, it isn’t. It ends with an assault and a police station and the man’s father standing between them. It ends with a man “who thought he knew everything … as if he’d been touched and turned to gold by a foolish, laughing king.” 

Moore’s brilliant ability to gaze upon the fragilities that motivate men’s literal consumption of women’s bodies (an unwanted touch, a punch, a metaphorical terrestrial thirst), is so precise and deadpan. When a man complains that the man in her poem is too one-dimensional and asks “can’t you make him more interesting” she wishes she had said “no, I can’t—that’s the best thing about him,” instead, as she recalls, “maybe I just smiled—nodded my head.” The reader feels the authoritative weight of Moore’s narration. In poems where encounters with men are gentle, the speaker and the man are figured as parallel objects (candles, doors, boats) that never quite meet, but lean toward each other, anchored in their own ontology: “we lay twice a week in each other’s beds / like two unlit candles / we were not for each other and in this we were wise.” Moore understands that when we come into unwanted relationality with another, such intersubjectivity can be violent. Better to be a cohesive object of our own making.

I’ve been following Moore’s work for a few years and she remains, in my estimation, one of the United Kingdom’s most compelling poets. I’ve never read a mediocre poem by this poet and whenever I see her name on a publication, I don’t know exactly what I am in for, but I know I will be led.