Part lyric, part memoir, Everything, now, Jessica Moore’s heart-rending debut, describes an untimely death and the journey of going on alone. The book stares down loss and struggles to transform that loss into language that can pass through boundaries of intricate sorrow; the act of translation here is not about two different languages—although Moore uses her own translation of Jean-François Beauchemin’s Turkana Boy as a template for translating death into life, past into present—but about the necessity to put the inexplicable into words that might hint at its intensity.

Jessica Moore is the author of a collection of poems, Everything, now (Brick Books, 2012), and the translator for Mend the Living (Talonbooks, 2016), a translation of the novel by Maylis de Kerangal, which was longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker International Prize and won the Wellcome Book Prize in 2017. Moore’s writing has also appeared recently in BOMB, Canadian Art, Arc, CV2, The New Quarterly, Carousel, The Volta and The Antigonish Review. Moore lives in Toronto, ON.

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Everything, now – part lyric, part memoir – confronts the brutality of loss and resurrects a life by means of deeply felt narrative and vividly rendered images. Jessica Moore has constructed a moving testament to a much-loved partner and, by extension, to all those who have died far too soon.

Jane Urquhart