Cleave

In her debut collection, Tiana Nobile grapples with the history of transnational adoption, both her own from South Korea and the broader, collective experience. In conversation with psychologist Harry Harlow's monkey experiments and utilizing fragments of a highly personal cache of documents from her own adoption, these poems explore dislocation, familial relationships, and the science of love and attachment.

A Rona Jaffe Foundation award winner, Nobile is a glimmering new talent. Cleave attempts to unknot the complexities of adoptee childhood, revealing a nature of opposites--"the child cleaved to her mother / the child cleaved from her mother"--while reckoning with the histories that make us.

Abstract
Foster Mother

The first time I belonged to a woman,
my body a fresh bulb broken off at the root.
She kept me for six months,
watched spit bubble from my pursed lips.

I wonder if she ever claimed me,
if she rocked me to sleep on her chest,
if she wiped my mouth gently saying,
There you go, there you are.