A sharp, darkly funny, and tender debut that exposes the fractures in our language, our technologies, and our attempts to call the world by its right name. In June in Eden , Rosalie Ruth Moffett leads us through terrains that shift between the mythic and the modern. Sometimes the garden is wild and blooming; other times, the coveted tree is only hiding a cell tower, lungs become ATMs, and prayers travel by text message. This is a book for an age when “new kinds of war…keep / changing the maps,” and when even small slips— preying or praying —reveal the instability of the words we rely on. At the heart of the collection lies an obsession with language: its power, its failures, and what remains when it falters. “Ruth,” our speaker notes, is “a kind of compassion / nobody wants anymore—the surviving half / of the pair of words is ruthless.” Throughout these poems, dark humor coexists with deep tenderness, reminding us of the human urge to “love the world / we made and all its shadows. Moffett offers a speaker bewildered and awestruck by the world’s contradictions—its technological miracles, its medical uncertainties, its imaginative leaps. These poems, equal parts grief and wonder, give us a landscape that from some angles resembles paradise, and from others, something far stranger. “Such a disturbing and solacing book! ‘Hello, Robot,’ says a little boy in a grocery store to the shiny singing coffee grinder. These poems startle, charm, deepen. Rosalie Moffett makes it a point not to know it all, but, trust me, she knows plenty, taking prisoner after prisoner only to release them again to the outer space of wonder and selflessness, sanity and grief. She remembers: ‘Because Rosi, don’t you love / this Eden—its beetles, its blooms all waiting / to be named.’ These are poems we need in our age of terrible troubles.” —Marianne Boruch, author of  Cadaver, Speak  and  Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing     “Aphasia: the impairment of the mind to comprehend language; literally, to be at a loss for words. Rosalie Moffett eloquently replaces the abstract language of clinical diagnosis with profoundly affecting descriptions of her mother’s deteriorating verbal grasp, ‘a city / at night with small, black power outages.’ Like a series of nesting dolls, these poems submerge us into the central core of mind and body, ‘the mercy of the interior’ where loss can be reconciled with love.” —D. A.  Powell, author of  Useless Landscape     “Rosalie Moffet’s tender and brilliant poems constitute a ‘fractal / of receptacles’ where we can more deeply perceive the strangeness of language, its many mirrors and doors, hazards and possibilities. Her wide-ranging knowledge—of anatomy, animals, botany, and much, much more—shapes her highly original imagination as she struggles to understand the ways we are ‘at the mercy of the interior.’  June in Eden  offers a vision of how such struggle can transform our shared condition into something infinitely more lustrous and merciful.” —Mary Szybist, author of  Incarnadine  (winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Poetry)    Rosalie Moffett is the author of Making a Living , Nervous System, and June in Eden . She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, New England Review, Narrative, Poetry, Kenyon Review, and Ploughshares, among others. She is an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern Indiana, and the Senior Poetry editor for the Southern Indiana Review. Biology   I know metamorphosis turns a kaleidoscope into a caterpillar and then into a gypsy moth with a white furry mouth. I’ve learned some things. To mimic injury the plover drags a wing in the dust. The lure of a wound is always enticing away from something smaller, more vulnerable. Inside what looks like a dress, gauzy white silk, the tent caterpillars set to ruining the tree. This World, Its Weather   Not dawn, but the microwave doing its mysterious molecule rattling with a cup of coffee. The hum-comfort and glow— up this early, I can’t help it if I see a dead ringer for the sun there, next to the sink. For a time, I was a twin. I waited in something I imagine as a planetarium with the one who was not me, who would disappear. This was before my brain began to take its automatic notes, so I felt nothing that I know of when the partition went up between us. I was assigned to this world, its weather and oceans and dark 6am kitchens, my body well-suited to transmit messages: how spring came all of a sudden with its mania of crocuses, how it burnt just now, the coffee pulled from its star. I fire my circuitry, feel each thing the way a fax machine would: brilliant as it passes through. Somewhere, I have a sister circuit, wired in mirror image. All night I understand the data to be hers.