Women on the Moon

About Debora Kuan 

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.

Praise for Women on the Moon

’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