Book
The Silk the Moths Ignore animates the liminal, sometimes gothic, spaces of miscarriage, pregnancy, and early parenthood with exquisite defamiliarizing detail. Weaving together prose versets, sonnets, and short poems like incantations “Against Choking” or “To Acknowledge Damage,” the collection sings, bleeds, and casts spells to “carry hope like a weight.”
Advance Praise
Bronwen Tate’s The Silk the Moths Ignore is such gorgeous and improbable and wrenching and alchemical music—the kind of languaging by which our knowing, our very lives, are re-made. These poems somehow illuminate the deepest interior while leaving dirt under your fingernails.
—Ross Gay, author of Be Holding
The Silk the Moths Ignore is an intimate, dazzling meditation on the corporeal nature of motherhood and the grief of miscarriage. Bronwen Tate’s poems deftly invoke the vivid tenderness of the natural world—its basswood trees and clustered asters, duck-weed and linden bowers—to create moment after moment of searing lyric intensity. This astonishing debut moves through devastation and loss by engaging with, attending to, and rendering the simultaneous transience and permanence of the material world, and ultimately reminds us: “Carry hope like a weight.”
— Erika Meitner, author of Holy Moly Carry Me
The keening of loss, the upswelling of love and comfort weave seamlessly together in the spell this poet casts over reality. An astonishing debut from a wonderful new voice.
— Monica Youn, author of Blackacre
