Since the publication of Thylias Moss's first book of poetry in 1983, her reputation has soared. As a poet who emerged a generation after the poets of the turbulent 1960s, Moss produces poetry that is nevertheless indicative of this political period in that her work is sometimes caustic, social, and moral, but she also breaks away from the antiestablishment protests and develops a fresh richness in her poetry with sensitivity, delicacy, and humanism. What emerges as a result of her ability to be an observer are poetic expressions that are vivid, accurate, and distinctive. She also achieves through her poetry a tonal quality that progresses from anger to joy, a quality that finally accomplishes in her fourth book of poetry what she terms "control." She weaves themes of freedom and mother-daughter relationships into her work. Although Moss's poetry is not strictly autobiographical, it does reveal a panorama of what she has seen and heard. She is a copious recorder of others' realities as well as her own. The result is introspective narrative poetry and the articulation of deep-seated emotion and thoughts.
Born into a stable, working-class environment in Cleveland, Ohio, on 27 February 1954, Thylias Rebecca Brasier Moss was an only child. Her mother, Florida Missouri Gaiter Brasier, was the daughter of a farm family from Valhermosa Springs, Alabama. Mrs. Brasier spent her life as a maid and, in the words of her daughter, "made it to the dean's list of preferred housekeepers; she is a maid of honor." Moss's father, Calvin Theodore Brasier of Cowan, Tennessee, was a recapper for the Cardinal Tire Company. Moss remembers her childhood as an idyllic, happy one with doting parents who catered to the needs of their precocious daughter.
Moss wrote her first short story at the age of six and her first poem ("Little Boys and Little Girls") at age seven on the back of a bulletin of the New Bethlehem Baptist Church. By the time she entered Alexander Hamilton Junior High School, she wanted to write novels.
After graduating with honors from John Adams High School, she entered Syracuse University, where she became distraught over racial tension but nevertheless remained at the school two years (1971-1973). At age sixteen she had met John Lewis Moss in church, and three years later she married him in her mother's dining room (6 July 1973). They are the parents of two sons, Dennis and Ansted. Moss cheerfully includes the names of her mother, husband, children, and relatives in her poetry and expresses unbridled joy in her fourth book. She is no longer plagued by the sometimes bitter temperament of her earlier life.
When Moss returned to college, she entered Oberlin College, where she received a B.A. in creative writing (1981). She later received her M.A. in English (1983) from the University of New Hampshire. At New Hampshire her professors encouraged her creativity but were troubled over what they sensed was a tone of anger in her poetry. She began, however, to sharpen her intellectual and creative ability and to surface from the introverted lethargy of her past.
Moss, who was always at the top of her class, has received four grants from Kenan Charitable Trust (1984-1987); an artist's fellowship from the Artists' Foundation of Massachusetts (1987); and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (1989). She was a winner of the Pushcart Prize (1990); the Witter Bynner Prize (1991); the Dewars Profiles Performance Artist Award (1991); and the Whiting Writer Award (1991); and she was showcased on the cable network BRAVO! (1992). She currently holds a faculty position at Phillips Andover Academy in Massachusetts.
By the time Moss completed her degree at the University of New Hampshire, she was well on her way to becoming a published poet. Hosiery Seams on a Bowlegged Woman (1983) is the result of a request from the Cleveland State University Poetry Center. Her poetic talent had caught the attention of Alberta Turner and Leonard Trawick when she won the Academy of American Poets College Prize, sponsored by the public-library system of Cleveland. The poem "Coming of Age in Sanduski" won her the award. She was in her second year of graduate study and had never had the inclination to write a book of poetry. The poems she selected for the collection were ones she had on hand. Many of the poems included in this book were thought by her college professors to be expressions of hostility. In spite of that fact, Moss was first runner-up for the Best of the Great Lakes Prize for a first book. The poems in Hosiery Seams reflect introspective vision and individual experience.
Her second book, Pyramid of Bone (1989), was solicited by Charles Rowell at the University Press of Virginia. Putting the book together was a deliberate effort, but Moss did not feel as much "in control" as she would like to have been. After an agreement was made about the poems to be included, Moss and the publishers reached an impasse on the title. Approximately one year elapsed before a title was selected by the publishers from a list of five titles that Moss submitted. Her stance in this book is one of interrogation about God, womanhood, and heritage. She writes in "Development of an Adult Nightmare": "As A Christian / I'm supposed to want to be this humble." Moss's tone in this book is not hostile but practical, not emotional but matter-of-fact. For Pyramid of Bone Moss was first runner-up for the 1989 National Book Critics Circle Award.
She calls her third book, At Redbones (1990), "more concept oriented, one that has an organizing principle." Redbones symbolizes a gathering place, part club, part church, but a mythical place. Moss says that the poem "Lunch Counter Freedom" and others reflect memories of the 1960s in which the struggle for personal freedom was thematic of the times.
Finally Moss feels that she has gained full "control" in the publication of Rainbow Remnants in Rock Bottom Ghetto Sky (1991), which has a theme of joy and reasons for jubilation. That jubilation is sparked by her reclaiming the personal happiness that she had long denied. She writes about identity, bonding, womanhood, and pregnancy--themes that are held together by the forces of joy. Hope is also a central focus in the book, a reason to survive and to find something to cheer about in a world that is not perfect. Moss says "denied joy or repressed joy is not really joy." Her main reason for celebration is her "control," which to her is ultimate empowerment and entitlement. She writes in "The Rapture of Dry Ice Burning Off Skin As the Moment of the Soul's Apotheosis":
How will we get used to joy
if we won't hold onto it"
... Joy
is at our tongue tips: let the great thirsts and hungers
of the world be the marvelous thirsts, glorious hungers.
Let heartbreak be alternative to coffeebreak, five
midmorning minutes devoted to emotion.
Moss's book was chosen by Charles Simic as part of the National Poetry Series.
Moss is writing a new book of poetry, scheduled for release at the end of 1992; she is also working on a children's book, another volume of poetry, a collection of tales and at anthology of short fiction. Her readership has continually grown as her career has progressed.
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