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In this series Mary Tautin Moloney’s poems are inspired by and paired with photographs taken in the subway stations of New York by photographer John Moloney. The work captures the desire to connect alongside the alienation that can come with being alive; how these forces bear on one another and affect us. Mary Tautin Moloney is inspired by what she hears and observes in everyday life: the character of a place; linguistic quirks; her children and motherhood. Her collaborator, photographer John Moloney, is drawn to taking the familiar and making it unfamiliar. In both rural and urban landscapes, he plays with scale, light, and texture to create moments of seeing something for the first time. As one poem leads to the next, a journey emerges through an entirely new landscape, one of the emotional life lived. A touchstone for this project, and Tautin Moloney’s writing in general, is to “cleave to the legendary,” advice once given by Stanley Kunitz to Mark Doty. With this series, photography becomes the entry point for speaking to our larger, shared emotional existence.

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Mary Tautin Moloney and John Moloney

Mary Tautin Moloney was a 2016 National Poetry Series finalist and a 2015 Bread Loaf Camargo Residency fellow. Her work has appeared in Tar River Poetry and Quarterly West, among others. She has an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College and works as a freelance instructional designer in Maplewood, NJ.

John Moloney has photographed weddings, glaciers, and the Great Barrier Reef. He studied at the International Center of Photography with Wendy Richmond, and learned exposure theory in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. John attended Iowa State University and has an MBA from the University of Minnesota.