WOMEN ON THE MOON (Debora Kuan)

“This is a book of motherhood, of birthing, of tenderness, of the domestic, a book of ‘animal attention’ … 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.’”
– Tess Taylor, author of Work & Days and Rift Zone

WOMEN ON THE MOON

POEMS BY
DEBORA KUAN

September 15, 2023 · The Word Works
9781944585761 · Paperback · $19.00 · 104pp

In her third and most intimate collection yet, WOMEN ON THE MOON (October 2023; The Word Works), celebrated poet 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.

With raw vulnerability and sharp consideration, Kuan investigates the female experience in all its multifaceted fullness and complexity. Throughout her varied yet cohesive collection, Kuan exemplifies the tension between the expectations on women and the reality of all that a woman carries. Women today, especially in America, must navigate personal wants and fears amid a dangerous society, while also being nurturing, patient, and gracious mothers.

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 the journey from girlhood to motherhood, each stage marked by a phase of the moon. Or rather, as Kuan puts it, “in retrograde: from motherhood, to womanhood, to childhood, and then, finally, to being.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

DEBORA KUAN is the author of two previous poetry collections XING (Saturnalia) and Lunch Portraits (Brooklyn Arts Press). She has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, Macdowell, and the Santa Fe Art Institute. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The New Republic, Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Boston Review, The Baffler, Fence, The Iowa Review, ZYZZYVA, and other publications. She has been anthologized in publications such as the Brooklyn Poets Anthology, Advanced Language and Literature, What Things Cost: An Anthology for the People, and the forthcoming Poetry Studio: Prompts for Poets. She is the current poet laureate of Wallingford, CT, where she lives with her family and works remotely for the MIT Press.