WOMEN ON THE MOON
(out Sept. 15, 2023)
’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.’
“’It tore the breath from my throat,’ Kuan writes about the complexity of navigating the very project of feeling now. At their heights these poems tear the breath from ours, too.”
—Tess Taylor
“Debora Kuan’s Lunch Portraits is a journey into husbands, hoagies, mermaids, earthquakes, lounge singers, fertility, mammals, hot dogs, and oranges. It is a journey into what it means to be female in America today and the ways in which the landscape of the everyday can both subvert and enlarge our existence. It is a journey on a weird tilt of ekphrasis, where the very stuff we see and experience has its holy time in the world of a poem—where language can be the thing to both save and destroy. Lunch Portraits is an awesome book and I know it will change your life for the better. ”
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“Debora Kuan’s Xing is novelistic in its scope. From “Articles of Faith” to “How to Make Bells,” with numerous parabolic twists and turns, Xing unmasks at times the almost unsayable. This is a beautiful, necessary, veracious voice assaying the vagaries of contemporary life and culture illuminated by flashes of history. ”
“This is a work of stunning crossings and double-crossings, crystalline opacities and ambiguous precisions. It’s quite unlike anything I’ve read: A dizzying blend of drama, fractured narrative, real or invented family history, elegy, dream, religious meditation, erotic diary, critique of both Western nihilism and of any suggestion of Eastern mysticism—critique, indeed, of the possibility of thinking “East” and “West” in the global marketplace. Kuan is a master of “the rhetoric of gamesmanship,” bringing a naturalist’s gaze to artificial surroundings, and a poet’s vestigial desire for transcendence to a landscape in which “We came to understand/ our place as elsewhere, anywhere/ always just before or after.””
“Descriptive power, clear seeing, vivid, various material—Debora Kuan’s poems have everything. She is a provocative and deeply rewarding poet.”
“As Andre Breton’s epigraph proposes that “everything beyond is here in this life,” Debora Kuan’s marvelous debut book of poems, Xing, contains multitudes in this singular collection where the quotidian is replete with unexpected crossings and surreal transformations.”