Flame Shoulder Moth by Diana Deering

Deep anguish never dims the praise of the natural world which Deering brings to these poems.  Simplicity of leaves, street lights, bare branches, and the paradox of the unknowable yet strangely intimate moth guide the speaker.   Deering’s steady pacing and music are prayerful, lit by a source-fire inside a healer’s heart.  Care-worn and wounded, the heart endures terror, woeful doubt, and hidden presences inside a world of hospitals and hallways, solitary rooms and crowded marketplaces.  Yet the speaker also knows “There are many kinds of mourning” and hears, finally, the voice of mercy—tender laborer—promising “something vast, irreducible, a spirit summoned by the needing and the making.”   That is the work of the poet, after all, the making.

–Judith Vollmer, author of five books of poetry, including, most recently, The Apollonia Poems, (University of Wisconsin Press 2017), awarded the Four Lakes Poetry Prize.

When “every human” has turned into “a razor,” how do you live?  As these poems navigate toward answers, the way moths navigate toward sources of light, they spar with darkness, with disorienting artifice, and with the blades of shunning.  Diana Deering’s moth, an ardent listener, helps the speaker nurse meaning back into language so she may “resist erasure,” “testify to inner voices,” and “prepare for metamorphosis.” Moth: soul sister, witness, guide, curandero, self. Never has a metaphor felt more necessary. Threaded with constellations of griefwords, gauzewords, borrowed words, Flame shoulder moth redefines bravery. Its truths incandesce and set the arguments of silence ablaze.

–Mihaela Moscaliuc

Diana Deering’s Flame Shoulder Moth is unlike any other book I’ve read—excruciatingly delicate and devastated. The book is a meditation on care and on the insidiousness of institutions that make money on care but do not practice it. I can scarcely read it, it’s a book of agony, yet I have read it over and over, because through it I have come to believe, too, that “even the unlucky cannot be wholly captured, the soul will not allow it”. Deering tells us, at the worst, in the fire, sometimes there is still a vast loving presence that surrounds the anguish.

–Sarah Vap