On Friday, September 15, 2023, Debora Kuan, the poet laureate of Wallingford, CT, released her third poetry collection, Women on the Moon. 

Kuan hosted and read at several events around the state (including an event with friend of The Echo Aaron Caycedo-Kimura) this summer to promote her book. Shortly after meeting her, I interviewed her about her path to becoming Wallingford’s poet laureate as well as her writing process.

When Kuan saw the Wallingford poet laureate listing from the Wallingford Public Library website, she simply sent in an application, which included some letters of recommendation and a writing sample. “A friend also sent it to me,” she said. 

“I remember another good friend of mine, saying, ‘I hope you get a fair shake!’ because I suppose she was worried that we’re new in town–she and I are both faculty spouses of Choate teachers who came to Wallingford in 2018–and sort of outsiders, so it was a sweet concern of hers. But it all worked out!”

Before her time as poet laureate, Kuan released two collections: XING in 2011 and Lunch Portraits in 2016. In Women on the Moon, Kuan focuses on various life stages of womanhood. Her main motif is the Chinese moon goddess Chang-E, who represents how Kuan felt about herself earlier in life:

“Chang-E was perhaps the way I saw myself before–dreamy, lofty, desirable, forever young. And in doing a lot of soul-searching and reading and therapy, I came to realize how problematic that was, that so much of how I saw myself or wanted to see myself was an oppressive result of the patriarchal white male gaze, which infantilizes and fetishizes Asian women and the Asian female body. So, in finally taking the leap into the unknown and reclaiming my body as my own, I was forcing Chang-E, too, to leave that imprisoned place on the moon and become empowered with her own choices. I tried to imagine those choices for her, tried to imagine a different fate for her than just forever being isolated on the moon, pining after her lost love.”

While Chang-E does not have children, she still appears as a very matriarchal figure in Women on the Moon. “I was drawn to her because I had such a difficult road to becoming a mother–not physically, but psychologically,” Kuan said. She explained:

“I never really thought I’d be one, and I never could really imagine myself as one. I always thought I’d be better suited to being a favorite aunt or something, but my older sister was not planning to have children, so I really had to blaze that path myself. And I went to a therapist to work through a lot of the anxiety and terror I felt about becoming a mom, about childbirth, about everything that comes with the territory–the incredibly high stakes of being (almost always) the primary caregiver of a child.”

The structure is also based on the moon phases, and each phase correlates to a  stage of womanhood. The middle section is called “Gibbous”; every poem but one features Chang-E. On this, Kuan said:

“The poems in the Gibbous section are really moments in which I am not using the moon goddess as a proxy for myself, but I am imagining her as herself. ‘Unsolicited’ speaks to a direction my life didn’t take–mercifully. It’s a path that would have led to the isolation that the Moon Goddess was actually relegated to, not the transformative one I write for her.”

Another figure Kuan includes in Women on the Moon is Freddie Mercury. “Hot Space” is a poem written after Mercury and nods to the book’s celestial motifs as well as Mercury’s legacy. Speaking on the connection to his work, she said:

“He’s an odd figure for a collection about womanhood and misogyny, but he was an important hero for me as a teenager because I didn’t realize initially that he wasn’t white. When I learned that his real name was Farrokh Bulsara, it was eye-opening and inspiring to see someone a little more like myself in the world being outrageous and radical and artistic; there was no other BIPOC representation in music for me back then. So he’s in the collection because racially and artistically he mattered a lot to me.”

Kuan also experiments a lot with form in Women on the Moon. In addition to wordfind, rewritten fairytales, and Mad Libs poems, Kuan includes several poems that dance across the page in terms of alignment. “With a long poem–especially if it’s driven by narrative–I just feel it’s more inviting and makes for a more pleasurable reading experience if the poem isn’t heavily left-justified. I feel like those caesuras allow for some air in the poem and make revelations feel more organic,” Kuan said.

The unconventionally aligned poem that stood out the most to me was “How to Raise Children at the End of the World.” This poem started as a prose poem, but Kuan found it became more impactful after changing the structure. “I noticed that once I took it out of prose, I couldn’t have a single slack moment or word in the poem,” she said. “Every phrase had to feel earned and deserving of its physical place within the line or beyond the caesura. It was one of those moments when you really see the dramatic difference between writing prose and poetry.”

Of course, craft is something every writer considers at some point. After craft comes the possibility of submitting. No matter how many times you do it, putting yourself out there always feels a little terrifying.

If you are considering submitting your writing outside of an academic setting, Kuan has these words for you: 

“It’s tough. It’s really tough. And with AI now, the entire writing landscape is changing. But I think there will always be an appetite and a market for literature. We’re human beings, and we inherently want to express ourselves and to make meaning of our experiences and our lives and share those experiences and lives with other human beings. AI can’t threaten that. 

“I’ll be honest that while I have kept at this artform of poetry for decades, there is very little money to be made…You have to have a day job. Even the prize monies for poetry have not increased or kept pace with inflation. Just like wages haven’t increased significantly since the 70s. But the best advice I can give is to be addicted to it. You won’t write because you should write. You won’t write because you want to be famous or to make millions. You’ll write because you’re addicted to it, and it feels damn good to write, and there’s no better feeling in the world than crafting a piece of writing that lays your heart bare and makes other people also feel less alone in their own lives. That’s all there is to it at the end of the day. That’s where the gold is.”

Women on the Moon is out now with all major booksellers. Please consider supporting local indie bookstores like Danbury’s The Booksmiths Shoppe or Bethel’s Byrd’s Books, or buy through Bookshop.org to support any indie bookstore. Women on the Moon is a poetry collection that should grace every person’s bookshelf.