Amber McBride's ME (MOTH)

Poetry was our first vehicle for long-form storytelling - witness all the national epics and the ones that have become world treasures. Homer's stuff. The Icelandic sagas. The Mahabharata. The Kalevala. All of that. I've read almost all of it and daydream about doing a podcast dedicated to this art form.

The novel in verse is only slightly a thing in our day and age, though. There's the Aniara, largely on the strength of which (and it is mighty strong), Harry Martinson won a Nobel Prize. There's Vikram Seth, who writes novels in sonnets... but I don't see a lot of people employing pure lyric as a medium for storytelling. Though maybe I just haven't looked hard enough. 

I sure did find me a terrific one, though.

In Me (Moth), poet-novelist Amber McBride tells a melancholy and beautiful coming-of-age romance one almost unbearably lovely lyric at a time -- with each line both advancing the plot and demonstrating what perfection in expressive lyricism looks like, all in just a few lines.

Our heroine, Moth (named by Shakespeare-loving parents after a fairy in A Midsummer Night's Dream) is a Black teenaged girl and talented ballet student who once dreamt of being the next Misty Copeland before tragedy ripped her out of the world in which that seemed possible and dumped her in a new city and a new high school full of unfriendly strangers. She endures it quietly and alone until the next new kid comes along, half-Navajo Sani, depressed and lonely and trying to disappear behind his hair and a cloud of cigarette smoke. 

Their relationship begins on a school bus bus, their whispered confidences perfectly pithy and perfectly imagined. They reveal their secrets to one another slowly and carefully until we love both of them to pieces and are so invested in their well-being that we almost want to stop reading to keep them safe from what McBride probably has in store from them, but of course that would be a mistake.

With a name like Moth, our girl can't help but pay attention to these insects, their habits and their life cycles -- and in the process of illustrating this, McBride constructs some of the best poetry about insects I've encountered since first reading Hart Crane's "The Moth Whom God Made Blind" decades ago.*

 

But just as Me (Moth) joins the Crane poem in examining the surprise and heartbreak of a creature out of its element, it gropes more with issues of survivor's guilt and especially with the question of how much joy is appropriate for a grieving survivor to feel or express as life goes on ("Maybe if I didn't gorge myself on life, there would have been some left in the car for Mom & Dad & Zachary," Moth muses early on). Both Moth and Sani are "muffling our passions, for reasons" as Sani says to Moth in their first exchange of text messages. 

Both, too, are heirs to a little bit of magic; Moth had a grandfather proficient in Hoodoo, which, he told her long ago, shares elements with Native American medicine -- Sani's Navajo father's own area of expertise. It's like the two were made for each other, a healthier, if initially sadder, Veronica and J.D. Only instead of terrorizing their school, the pair up and run away with one another in search of both a kinder and more interesting life.

Their road trip across the American south lets them stop at poignant sites associated with this country's twin sins of slavery and indigenous genocide, a sad background against which their gentle courtship is conducted, and they compose together their Summer Song, which Sani will sing and to which Moth will finally dance again. 

This is a book to savor slowly as one would a great poetry collection, but doing so will require a supreme effort as the reader is gently propelled by the story of this journey of discovery and connection. Amber McBride absolutely shattered my heart, but then very kindly swept up the pieces and sewed them back together with good red string. I can't wait to see what she does next!

*I swear that the text of this poem used to be available to just read online but hell if I can find someplace to link to here. The internet is getting so effing broken.