Mary Moore Easter's new collection, her fifth, chronicles the dramatic aftermath of open-heart surgery and the removal of a life-threatening aneurism. She recounts episodes in her healing journey and gradual recovery, and celebrates the sources of inspiration that helped her to return to her dancing self, including a visit with family to ancestral West Africa. Several of the poems are accompanied by QR codes, by means of which readers can listen to Easter sing her songs, reviving the artistic link between her spoken ancestry and the legacy alive in her children and grandchildren. Brash political events also burst onto the page as the larger world becomes immersed in fear and chaos far greater than the threat to the poet's own individual survival. But in the end, this collection celebrates the life and the love that renewed health can make possible. These poems sing, dance, and love, on the edge of the eternal precipice that defines our lifespan.
Mary Moore Easter is the author of four poetry books: From the Flutes of Our Bones (2021); The Body of the World (Minnesota Book Award in Poetry Finalist, 2019), Walking from Origins, and Free Papers , poems inspired by the testimony of Eliza Winston, a Mississippi slave escaped to freedom in Minnesota in 1860 (2022). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, The Christian Century, Water~Stone, SoFloPoJo, and other publications as well as several anthologies. She gives numerous public readings in Minnesota and from coast to coast. Her work has also been used as texts for art songs—she was Poet-in-Residence for the 2022 Source Song Festival—and on library-sponsored poetry trails. Born during segregation, in Petersburg, Virginia, to parents on the faculty of Virginia State College (now University), Mary Moore Easter was as immersed in their artistic and intellectual interests as she was in the limitations that segregation imposed on her Black world. Her adult career as an independent dancer/choreographer and founder and director of Carleton College's dance program overlapped with writing as a Cave Canem Fellow at the foundation for African American poetry. Her awards include an Artist Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board (2020), Pushcart Prize-nominations, and a Bush Artist Fellowship in Choreography, multiple McKnight Awards in Interdisciplinary Arts, The Loft Literary Center's Creative Non-Fiction Award, and residencies at Ragdale and The Anderson Center. Easter holds a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence and an M.A. in Music for Dancers from Goddard. She retired from formal teaching with the title Rae Schupack Nathan Professor of Dance and the Performing Arts Emerita.
In 2022, Carleton College named the new studios in the Weitz Center for Creativity to honor her legacy: the Mary Easter Dance Studios.
"Mary Moore Easter's new collection insists on the magnetic pull and sweep of its story. The poems exhibit the tremendous will and joy in life that allowed the poet, at an older age, to regain her health after open-heart surgery with the help of good nursing by hospital staff and her dear daughters. Healing made it possible for Easter not only to travel to Senegal, where her ancestors were stolen to America, but also to stand in enraged witness to current events, write poems with a fierce radiance, and dance the tango with a new beloved. The book possesses, as does the author herself, an amazing lifeforce." — Margaret Hasse, author of Belongings
"Mary Moore Easter's poetry is a 'lyrical dance,' moving the reader through a palpable range of emotions. From faltering after open-heart surgery to tangoing in love after eighty-four years, the collection depicts her grace, grit, and gratitude on a syncopated healing journey." — Essence Bonitaz, author of Ajha's Web: A Series
"To dance along a precipice with grace and joy—solid ground to one side, the void to the other—takes, in Mary Moore Easter's apt phrasing, 'a poetry book's worth of headwork, heartwork, bodywork.' That is what she has given us in this wise collection of verse." — Stephen Peters, winner of the Lawrence Foundation Award for fiction
"Reader, Dancing on the Precipice is an important book. Between its pages is a story of the times creatively told in poems with no small amount of poetic license by Mary Moore Easter, citizen of Minneapolis, Minnesota, African-American teacher, dancer, and remarkable writer, who will take you into her very body to tell of life, personal challenge, healing, and love." — Karen Herseth Wee, author of The Book of Hearts and Baksheesh
