Review | ME (MOTH) by Amber McBride
Image ID 1: Photo of Amber McBride wearing a patterned dark blue and white pants and blazer. She is wearing a white patterned dress shirt and a periwinkle tie and a brown belt. She’s looking to her left and her long hair is down in sea blue, white, and black twists. A field is behind her.
Image ID 2: On a white background, a Black girl looks down. She is wearing a sea blue headband wrap. And her locs are pulled up. A big blue moth has landed on her forehead. Three other blue moths are flying or have landed on her hair. The title is in white “Moth” with a small “Me” in orange in the O of “Moth.” Amber McBride is written under the girl’s face in gray type.
ME (MOTH) by Amber McBride
Feiwel and Friends | Release Date: August 17, 2021
When you lose everything, what lingers? Poetry, ancestors, new love, and friendship are all woven into this beautiful debut verse-novel by Amber McBride that snagged the Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe Award along with being a Morris Award and National Book Award Finalist.
The book chronicles Black high school junior Moth, a girl whose entire immediate family died in a tragic accident. Moth finds herself hopeless and living with her aunt. Before her family was lost, she had been a dancer, but now the art feels far away and out of reach. She often reflects about her late grandfather, a Hoodoo root worker, and the lessons he taught her about relationships with those who are beyond.
McBride’s poetry beats with meaning, layers, specificity, and proximity to Hoodoo practices. Below is an excerpt from a poem titled “At Least They Were Hungry.”
“When I get home the food is still out
but the colors are dull.
Grandfather used to say,
That is how you know
the ancestors took the energy from the food.
So at least I am not all the way alone.”
In the pain of feeling incredibly alone, Moth befriends Sani at school and the two connect deeply. Sani struggles with depression and they embark on a road trip to his reservation the Navajo nation in New Mexico. The two make many stops along the way in various towns and motels while coming to terms with their ghosts, ancestors, generational trauma, and selves in a slow-burn, deep literary narrative. In the poem “Things My Grandfather Taught Me About The South,” McBride pulls in generational trauma with travel.
“The enslaved were one-third of the population in the South,
but their souls were not given any space.
The Constitution licked the lips of slavery
for more than two hundred years.
Dusty slave quarters with earth for floors
beside rotundas & white pillars.
Hoodoo was rooted to rebel.
When the pillars crumbled
America cleared her throat & yelled, Jim Crow.”
Along the road, there is pain, hope, and beauty as the two also find time for joy and existence. In an excerpt from “Pinnacle Mountain State Park, Arkansas” captures moments of resonant teenagerhood that shows the range of emotionality the two achieve.
“Sani lifts his arms above his head, making a mountain
with his hands & it starts to rain (again).
It is like only the water & wind live here.
I feel filled, like a caterpillar gorged;
my clothes are too tight,
my body too small,
so I lift my top over my head.
Next my jeans melt from my legs,
I jump into the lake”
McBride’s free verse brings specificity, fresh metaphors and language, and transformation and revelation with each poem. Without giving the end away, Moth and Sani’s journey is one that ends with a surprising and intriguing turn that compliments Me (Moth)’s quieter structure. The book calls for an eager rereading. Me (Moth) is a deep addition to the YA verse-novel scene and its twining of intersectionality between BIPOC cultures is truly stunning. McBride’s unique and artistic poetic voice is a truly welcomed addition to the world of YA verse.
This novel is for 12+. In addition to its success in the 2021 NBA and ALA awards, ME (MOTH) was selected as a best book by Shelf Awareness, A School Library Journal, People Magazine, Time Magazine, and was a NPR Best Book of the Year. Amber McBride is an English professor at the University of Virginia and holds an MFA in poetry from Emerson College. She’s had poetry published in various literary journals including Ploughshares and The Rumpus.
