UC Irvine

The moth is a ubiquitous symbol of desire, especially ill-fated or destructive desire.The image of the moth flinging itself into flame has been well-explored and arguably exhausted by writers past, though it persists as a shorthand for inexorable attraction. Simultaneously, however, a common experience of moths evokes visceral disgust: discovering a pantry moth infestation, larvae crawling through one’s flour and bread. The moth thus exists at the intersection of two emotions one might assume to be polarized; however, both eroticism and revulsion are felt keenly in the body. The female body, especially, has resonance, both linguistically (moth contained within mother) and in cultural discourses that polarize the functions of the female body as either erotic or repulsive. The first central experiment of these poems is thus to enter into the image of the moth in its many iterations, attempting to collapse this spectrum between disgust and desire, evoking one sensation and then incarnating its opposite. This project also has resonance with themes of holiness, or rather, finding holiness in things seen as fleshly or earthly. The poems seek to inhabit at once both religious consciousness and biological curiosity, straddling the tension between these two registers. vi The speaker is both physically and spiritually thirsty, scientifically minded yet often scripturally voiced. The speaker meditates and vacillates on whether the words of Matthew 6 — Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt — ought to be taken as truth or else entirely inverted: What if the moths are the treasures? This religious consciousness lends the poems their central tone or posture: that of the plea. The speaker is keenly aware of the metacognitive process of writing poetry and often reflexively breaks the fourth wall to directly address the reader, as the poems operate in the same register as prayer: reaching out to a listener who remains silent. These poems knowingly and anxiously ask emotional labor of the reader, invoking invitational language and seeking a cocreation of meaning. This is the project’s fundamental risk: Some readers will find the request for intimacy off-putting; however, this gamble is central to the manuscript’s project of rewiring religious impulses and interrogating holiness.