How to Moth
Will be published approx. on 22. July 2026
Book
Paperback/Softback
82 pages
978-0-8071-8708-1 (ISBN)
Description
How to Moth celebrates the joys and the griefs of a life of loving wine, women, and song. Working in both established forms and musical free verse, Hailey Leithauser takes us from slovenly blondes to tipsy milkmaids to Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, from pink peignoirs to beds made from burlap sacks, a salver of oysters to a nun's unset table, a fried surfer dame to the person from Porlock, and running throughout it all, the undeniable and unyielding urge to take a mad bite of the moon.
Reviews / Votes
"With sounds and rhythms at once ancient and pulsing, the poems in How to Moth brilliantly make both love and its loss pleasurable and enticing. They show us how to move from darkness to light-how to moth-and, like Edith Piaf, regret nothing." - Angie Estes"How to describe this glorious concatenation of language-the mystery, the ruddy lust, the transformation of nouns into verbs and back again, the dizzying lingo mambo that made me scream, 'This is what poetry can do!' Leithauser ropes you in with these generous poems-full meals with aperitifs, amuse-bouches, entrees, desserts, and ending with a wild dance party under the stars. If you want to learn how to volcano, moth, survive a lunar eclipse, swallow the moon, regret nothing, pine, or curse a demon, this is the book for you. Incandescence, your name is Hailey Leithauser. Wow!" - Barbara Hamby
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Baton Rouge
United States
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Dimensions
Height: 5 mm
Width: 229 mm
Thickness: 152 mm
Weight
104 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8071-8708-1 (9780807187081)
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Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Hailey Leithauser is the author of Swoop, winner of the Poetry Foundation's Emily Dickinson First Book Award and the Towson Prize for Literature, and Saint Worm. Her work has appeared widely in journals and anthologies such as Poetry, AGNI, Yale Review, and four editions of Best American Poetry. She lives in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC.