How to Moth

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.

"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, entrées, 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