The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Cleave by Tiana Nobile

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Abstract

For the first six months, I was a deferred plane ticket.

Contact comfort is a variable of overwhelming importance

The infant the pastor refused to baptize.

The development of affectional responses

I never sucked my thumb. I pulled out my hair instead.

Emotionality indices such as vocalization, crouching, rocking, and sucking

Call me Rhesus, macaque with mongolian spots.

We can be certain that

I cry with hunger but know the bottle.

Frantic clutching of their bodies was very common

This selection comes from Cleave, available from Hub City Press. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Leah Silvieus.

Tiana Nobile is a Korean American adoptee, Kundiman fellow, and recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. A finalist of the National Poetry Series and Kundiman Poetry Prize, her writing has appeared in Poetry Northwest, The New Republic, Guernica, and the Texas Review, among others. Her full-length poetry debut, Cleave, is forthcoming in Spring 2021 by Hub City Press. She lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. For more, visit www.tiananobile.com. Follow at @tiananob Leah Silvieus was born in South Korea and adopted to the U.S. at three-months old. She grew up in small towns in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley and western Colorado. She is the author of Anemochory (Hyacinth Girl Press), Season of Dares (Bull City Press), Arabilis (Sundress Publications) and co-editor with Lee Herrick of the poetry anthology, The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit (Orison Books). She is a recipient of awards and fellowships from Kundiman, The Academy of American Poets, and Fulbright and serves as a mentor on The Brooklyn Poets Bridge. A 2019-2020 National Book Critics Circle Emerging Fellow, Leah serves as a senior books editor at Hyphen magazine and an associate editor at Marginalia Review of Books. Her reviews and criticism have appeared in the Harvard Review Online, The Believer, and elsewhere.   She holds a BA from Whitworth University, an MFA from the University of Miami, and is currently an MAR candidate in Religion and Literature at Yale Divinity School/Institute of Sacred Music. Prior to Yale, she spent several years traveling between New York and Florida as a yacht chief stewardess.