Moira Egan's poems have appeared in many journals including POETRY, American Letters & Commentary, Boulevard, and The Laurel Review, and in the anthologies Kindled Terraces: American Poets in Greece and Lofty Dogmas: Poets on Poetics. She has an M.F.A. from Columbia University, where James Merrill chose her manuscript for the David Craig Austin Prize.

About Cleave:

"In these sexy poems, Moira Egan plays within and against the bondage of form. The deep ambiguities of Egan’s work are embodied in the economy of the title: both to cling and to separate, the contrasting impulses to ‘hold Love tight in a sonnet,’ and to become a reverse Penelope who walks out the door of the happy ending, abandoning the rooted bed. Lines linger with the reader, so that ‘all day you are reminded/ it was delicious/ and it was bitter.’"
—A.E. Stallings

"In Cleave, Moira Egan reminds us that the ‘wildest things require the strongest cages,’ and what a collection of marvelous and sturdy enclosures—triplets, sapphics, quatrains, sonnets, and sestinas—she has made, inside of which the creatures of her passions perch and sing. This is an exuberant, intelligent, and even ‘delicious’ debut."
— Michael Collier

"Moira Egan certainly has a way with words. She caresses them to get them to give up what they have to give, and we are the beneficiaries of that largesse… This poetry puts on formal raiment with ease, and leaves us clothed in its excellence."
—Cynthia Macdonald