Moira Linehan

Moira Linehan is an American poet. She graduated from Boston College, and Vermont College of Fine Arts, with an MFA. She lived in Winchester, Massachusetts, where she worked as an academic administrator. She has been a resident at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Millay Colony.
Her work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Green Mountains Review, Indiana Review, and Notre Dame Review, Triquarterly.

• 2006 Crab Orchard Award
• 2001 Honorable mention Thomas Merton Prize of Poetry of the Sacred

• https://www.mertoninstitute.org/merton_prize_winners_2001.php

• If No Moon. Crab Orchard Review. 2007. ISBN 978-0-8093-2761-4. 

Many poets, I presume, write with ghosts around them. Moira Linehan writes in the company of her husband’s ghost—made a ghost by succumbing to a four-year fight with cancer. Linehan invites the intrusion of her husband into many of her poems and even when she tries to uninvite him, Linehan and the reader realize that he is the permanent resident of her pages. Rarely is the process of grief so heartbreakingly rendered. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross could not have more accurately transferred the stages of grief into poetry. In her opening poem Linehan makes it clear that the reader, also, will be kept company by a haunting: “keep in mind, no matter where / this story goes, there’s a body / at the bottom of the quarry.” There is no avoiding this body as Linehan gradually closes the gap between the words, “absence,” and “presence.”