Lanternfly August - by Robin Gow (Paperback)

About the Book

Through poetics, Robin Gow contends with the emotional geographies of home through the lens of an often-demonized species of insect.

Book Synopsis

In Lanternfly August, Robin Gow contends with the emotional implications of home through the lens of an often-demonized species of insect.

Lanternfly August by Robin Gow swirls the insect world and human identity into a fascinating mandala of self discovery and investigation. These poems use the lanternfly, an insect that is often regarded with disdain, as a lightning rod to channel thoughts about identity, gender, and self.

Many of these poems focus on the concept of returning home. Specifically, the tension of returning to a place that you feel nostalgia for, but a place that nonetheless you've grown past.

Tender but focused, Lanternfly August asks readers to question their relationship to the lanternfly. Why do we see it as a pest? Why doesn't it belong? What else in our lives do we hold in contempt, and why?

This collection also features a bespoke interview with the writer at then end of the book, delving deeper into the craft, influences, and life behind their work.

These complex poems also address place and the body in equal parts. Set against the thematic backdrop of the despised lanternfly, these poems consistently challenge humanity's responses to what we consider our home.

Review Quotes

"In Lanternfly August, Robin Gow intertwines the metamorphosis of outlaws to implore, 'Will I still be beautiful without my hunger?' The formally inventive poems meditate on unheralded grace despite incremental apocalypse. By declaring, 'Will someone take a picture of me while I'm still breathing?' Gow teaches us to survive by embracing ephemerality over futurity."

-Sarah Sala, author of The Devil's Lake

"Robin Gow's Lanternfly August is a marvelous feat. Across this collection, Gow asks us to consider who or what is marked as invasive-like the lanternfly and the tree of heaven, which have the 'wrong body' or exist in the 'wrong context' and can be killed or cut down without consequence. These poems posit new pathways to identification in the face of such estrangement so that we might imagine anew what flourishing might come after ruin."

-Donika Kelly, author of bestiary and The Renunciations

"The title 'Lanternfly August' describes a point in the lanternfly's life cycle when it becomes a dramatic bright red, but Robin Gow's lushly volatile, shimmering book about gender, entomology, bodily experience, and local memory shuffles its chronology backwards and forwards like dealing cards, immersing us in the midst of change. This compelling book explores ways of being inside and outside the body simultaneously ('My walls were thoraxes, ' 'Gloves growing around fingers'). It meditates on violence ('Raise your foot high. Become a boy.'). It witnesses, it confides, experiments with an "I" both singular and plural, weighing metaphors of infestation with belonging."

-Trace Peterson, author of Since I Moved in