Description
New collection from poet Debora Kuan: motherhood, survival, marriage, and the Moon Goddess. What else could you need?
In her third and most intimate collection yet, Debora Kuan interrogates what it means to be a woman of color who is both a captive of and captivated by the gravitational pull of a man's world. Deploying the figure of the moon goddess Chang-E of Chinese legend as a proxy, Kuan explores the experiences of internalized racism, misogyny, and invisibility that arise from a decentered, alien status.
In rewritten fairy tales, word finds, Mad Libs, chess matches, magic lessons, rhyming tercets and quatrains, prose poems, and still lifes—cultural artifacts of an American childhood and the white hegemony—Kuan charts her journey from girlhood to motherhood, each stage marked by a phase of the moon. These poems reveal not only the compromises of a life lived in a liminal space, but also the power, grace, and beauty it takes to thrive there.
Poetry. Family & Relationships. Asian & Asian American Studies. Women's Studies.
“'A woman / must prove she can even love / what kills her,' writes Debora Kuan in the blazing new collection WOMEN ON THE MOON. Kuan brings her wild intellect to these poems, deconstructing motherhood, domesticity, racialization, modernity, and more. She writes intimacy and longing and selfhood as she channels the lunar phases, the legend of the moon goddess Chang-E, and historical and family narratives close and far. At times joyfully wry and at other times deeply searing, WOMEN ON THE MOON is a book for each and every phase.”
—Natalie Shapero
“Clear-eyed and full of grace, Debora Kuan’s WOMEN ON THE MOON lays bare the laborious fear involved when choosing love in a world built for violence: 'Every mother builds her miracle / in proximity to hell.' The image of the child whose body breaks the fall of another is forever seared into my mind as emblematic of the pressures on women—and specifically Asian American women—to give and give at the expense of ourselves. Punctuated with poems that reimagine the self as the moon goddess Chang-E, Kuan’s intimate third collection elevates the ugly unease of the domestic and of womanhood through lyrical prowess and impressive introspection.”
—Eugenia Leigh
“This is a book of motherhood, of birthing, of tenderness, of the domestic, a book of 'animal attention' where at the same time, even the raindrops turn 'mammalian.' And yet Debora Kuan proves herself to be 'a student of impossible binds,' as she puts it. For despite its lunar focus, WOMEN ON THE MOON is about mothering a child and a child of color in America, in an era of gunfire and wildfire smoke, at a moment when any tenderness cannot help but be 'its own pleat of grief.' Kuan writes about the complexity of navigating the very project of feeling now: 'It tore the breath from my throat.' At their heights, these poems tear the breath from ours, too.”
—Tess Taylor
Author Bio
Debora Kuan is the author of two previous poetry collections XING (Saturnalia, 2011) and Lunch Portraits (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016). She has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Santa Fe Art Institute. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Fence, The Iowa Review, ZYZZYVA, and others. She has been anthologized in publications such as the Brooklyn Poets Anthology (2017), Advanced Language and Literature (Bedford/St. Martin's), What Things Cost: An Anthology for the People (University Press of Kentucky, 2023), and the forthcoming Poetry Studio: Prompts for Poets. She is the current poet laureate of Wallingford, CT, where she works remotely for the MIT Press.
Author City: BROOKLYN, NY USA