Cleave Review by Megan Pinto

Cleave by Tiana Nobile

Review by: Megan Pinto

Spartanburg: Hub City Press, 2021

72 pages

$16.00

From “Child’s Pre-Flight Report”:

Name in Full: Moon, Yeong Shin ………………..Case Number: 87C-2411

Date of Birth: Oct. 22, 1987 ………………………..Date of Departure: April 2, 1988

Name of Escort: Unknown………………………… Destination: Unknown

In her debut poetry collection, Cleave, Tiana Nobile writes into her own unknown. A Korean American adoptee, Nobile explores the mechanisms of attachment and love, and the effects of separation on the psyche. 

“As a child, my origin story was a gaping hole I did not know how to fill,” Nobile writes in “Subverting the Script of the Adoption Industrial Complex” (Literary Hub). She continues: “Through writing, I was able to fill the absence with language. . . I began to consider it an opportunity to conjure the ghosts of my family, both in Korea and the United States, to ask them questions, and to hold them accountable.” 

Nobile gifts us with a vulnerable speaker, inviting readers into her inner life. In the collection’s opening poem, “Moon Yeong Shin,” the speaker holds a photograph of herself as a baby, with her Korean name written at the bottom. She reckons: “Many years passed before I learned / surnames come first in Korea.” Through deft associative leaps, the speaker riffs off the moon’s image, confessing in a breathtaking turn: 

                                                  I’ve spent my whole

life in orbit of other people’s light, celestial satellite

in ceaseless wane. How much can you learn

from a stranger’s surname?

As a reader, I carried this question throughout the book; it implicated a series of further questions, like: how can we come to know another person? How do we come to know ourselves?

Nobile’s modes of investigation are varied. She pulls from personal documents, news articles, research papers, historical records, and lays bare the rhetoric of adoption through erasure and association. Like in “The Stolen Generation,” where she creates an erasure of the Aboriginal Protection Act of 1869, and the Aborigines Protection Act of 1886. Or in “The Last Straw,” where she writes after a NY Post headline that reads, “U.S. woman put adopted Russian son on one-way flight alone back to homeland,” and the speaker observes: 

The carousel

    of     abandonment

  endlessly

      spinning

One the many strengths of this book is how the images haunt and linger long past the turning of the page. In a concrete poem, “Interview with Dr. Harlow,” (a psychologist most known for studying maternal deprivation and separating monkeys from their mothers) the speaker asks of Harlow: 

…………………………………………………..How does it feel

to watch them hold each other’s hands, their woolly

knuckles braided, the touch of their palms?” 

Harlow’s monkeys were separated from their own mothers and thrust into the cage for human study. Nobile responds to the rhetoric of research by writing a series of “Abstract” poems, that blur the line between animal need and human need, as well as giving voice to the monkeys themselves. In “Harlow’s Monkey,” Nobile gives voice the multiplicity of adoptee experiences we encounter throughout the collection:

In what shallow grave will we bury the words

we killed? Eomeoni. Abeoji. Daejeon.

Moon Yeong Shin. We deliver them

to the dirthmother and her family of worms. 

“Where do Asian American adoptees belong in the telling of the so-called great American project?” Nobile writes in her Lit Hub essay, “It is past time for us to take control of our narrative, to tell our own stories, to write our own poems.”

The truth is never simple. Many of Nobile’s poems use temporal and tonal shifts to further complicate the narrative of attachment. As she explores the relationship with her adoptive family in the United States. The speaker reflects on her brother as a child, and considers

………………………….How you must have imagined

my body rattling in the box during transport

as our mother scurried to the airport bathroom

to snap my joints into place.

(“Did You Know”) 

The image of the speaker’s body objectified, as something pre-packaged and needing assembly, is twice subverted as the speaker concedes: “Today we laugh about what you said.” And after a line break, she doubles back: “We laugh until we forget why we’re laughing.”

This doubling back, this looking and looking again, mimics the ethos of the book. “The word ‘cleave’,” the speaker explains half way through the collection, “means both to cut and to cling.” A few lines later, she asks:

How do you begin to reconcile a cleaving? 

We try to hold each other …………..without touching

Voices scramble …………..white noise fills our bones

(“The Stolen Generation”)

Megan Pinto’s poems can be found or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Lit Hub, Plume, The Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. She has received scholarships and fellowships from Bread Loaf, the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference, and an Amy Award from Poets & Writers. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson.