Women on the Moon

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.