Women on the Moon
Debora Kuan’s Women on the Moon opens with a pregnant speaker partially blinded when an eyeglass repairman accidently “snaps off one wing” of her glasses:
Lunchtime faces near and recede—
plates of melted custard,
a Pissarro of emphatic chatter—
as I retrace the way I came,
fledgling slow, a glass piano
on the floor of the sea
The book is divided into five sections, each named for a stage of the moon. Other poems in the opening “Last Quarter Moon: Mothering” tackle subjects such as older motherhood and the desire to protect one’s child in a world full of violence. The speaker recalls a failed attempt at rescuing a “cousin from the grip of / a gang”: “You would not save him. / The end of / the world had already come and gone.”
Perspective sharpens in the dynamic “Full Moon: Coupling,” such as with “Moon Goddess as a White Woman”: “You’re the only goddess who looks // in the mirror and expects to see a white woman / fucking. You small-talk like a lizard in athleisure.”
“It begins with such resolve,” begins another “coupling” poem, “Man & Wife,” which explores the tensions of marriage with a baby in the house: “We ready our sorrys on hooks by the nightstands, / so we can reach them as quick as we can.” In “How to Live with Your Husband,” the speaker examines the scorekeeping of marriage: “How could you ever make up for / the sum of strikes a wife / spends her life amassing?”
Along with that “sum of strikes,” is an inherited worldview:
Growing up my dad taught us
to contain
our happiness like sugared hot tea
brimming from a Dixie cup,
lest some fat-eyed god
discover it.
In its honesty about motherhood and partnership, Women on the Moon reclaims joy and power through its focus on the quotidian. In a series of still life poems—garbage cans, nesting boxes—we observe the speaker discover, “between the unsteady / shed and the neon dandelions, // a cloud of cartilage / and lobe.” “Still Life with Mushroom” concludes:
I have married my life to lowliness,
and I want to cry aloud with happiness.
