Mose - Paperback

by Loren Graham (Author)

A book-length narrative poem exploring one man's experience of crime and imprisonment.

A striking interplay of content and style makes this book-length narrative poem a wrenching, compelling tale. Mose is incarcerated in a Texas prison for a crime whose circumstances slowly unfold as he numbers the days of his sentence and fantasizes about a woman inexorably tied to his fate. As the harshness of prison life begins to close in and distort Mose's consciousness, he is increasingly obsessed with the truth of what happened. In the end, that inquiry reveals to him "another world underneath / this one" where everything "is backwards / to what we want." The journey to that world is a suspenseful and powerful study of a man's character and the trap it sets for him.

Author Biography

LOREN GRAHAM was born in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma in 1958. He attended college in Oklahoma and Texas and afterwards worked for some time as a teacher in a private high school in Waco and as an English instructor in the Texas penitentiary system. In 1988, he took his M.F.A. from the University of Virginia. He is now Assistant Professor of English at Lynchburg College in Virginia.