Poetry. Laura Moran's DESIRE LINE is a book of fragmentary texts—poetic lyric, prose-poem, one-act play, prose essay—that nevertheless assemble a whole way of experiencing the world. As she says, "The shard is the whole—no?" Moran is a mental traveler, a writer in love with the sounds and sense of language, its plasticity and history that take us back to the beginnings of human time. On one level, she recognizes that memory is desire and memory is personal history and therefore memory is home. Her childhood is rich within her, but as a mature writer she knows how to connect past to present, describe the reciprocal arc of desire from then until now: "What you touch touches back." It's a living, momentary process: or as she says in the book's final lines, "I first came to desire now. / Always now." If this were a book only of rich personal history, it would be enough, but Moran also explores the larger desire-lines and planes of human and planetary time... recalling our origins in the stars, in the oceans, in the earth elements, as well as in the watery womb.