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Cleave
In her debut collection, Tiana Nobile grapples with the history of transnational adoption, both her own from South Korea and the broader, collective experience. In conversation with psychologist Harry Harlow’s monkey experiments and utilizing fragments of a highly personal cache of documents from her own adoption, these poems explore dislocation, familial relationships, and the science of love and attachment. A Rona Jaffe Foundation award winner, Nobile is a glimmering new talent. Cleave attempts to unknot the complexities of adoptee childhood, revealing a nature of opposites—”the child cleaved to her mother / the child cleaved from her mother”—while reckoning with the histories that make us.
72 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 6, 2021
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103 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
May 19, 2021
I loved this poetry collection. The weaving in of Harlow's experiments with the adoptee experience is brilliant. Tiana shares some deeply personal struggles, thoughts of Korea, and of adoption. Her mastery with word choice is evident throughout: the title choice alone is spectacular. Poems to savour.
I'm still thinking about some of her phrasing using cleave.
I'm still thinking about some of her phrasing using cleave.
May 24, 2024
If I adopted a kid
and they grew up to write
an entire book about how
adoption is bad and ruined their life,
I think I'd ask Amazon for a refund.
and they grew up to write
an entire book about how
adoption is bad and ruined their life,
I think I'd ask Amazon for a refund.
Read
March 22, 2025still not entirely sure what i make of this but i am so grateful to tiana nobile for writing this in the first place. my poetry professor last semester recommended that i check out nobile’s work because i was writing a bit about my own experience as a transracial transnational adoptee and thank you george !! because this was exactly what i needed.
i feel like part of the challenge of being a transnational adoptee is the lack of guidance… when family history is how so many people understand the world (especially how writers narrativize their life) what does it mean to lack a family history? or for your family history to be stolen, either from you or by you. what i mean is it can feel very disorienting trying to navigate the world when there is this distance between your parents’ experience and your experience, and when you don’t belong to any culture fully. and this is exacerbated when it comes to being a poet! there’s certain blueprints (the generational blueprint, the asian american blueprint) that are not available to adoptees. so poets like nobile writing about adoption feels so very tremendous. because of nobile (and other poets like marci calabretta cancio-bello and ansley moon) there is starting to be a semblance of a literary canon/body of knowledge for adoptees. and also nobile’s notes have pointed me in the direction of other parts of this body of knowledge !
i really think the strongest parts of this collection are just the first and last poems (Moon Yeong Shin and Revisionist History, which bookend the collection so beautifully) and really, those may be the only poems i revisit. i read revisionist history before reading cleave in full, and it really is one of my favorite poems of all time maybe. i always have thought of myself as having been born in an airport! and the question of memory — “If I told you that I missed you, would you believe me? Would I?” there is something very adoptee about forgetting, about erasure but also the chosen forgettings that aren’t really a choice
i think the collection lost me at some point, honestly pretty early on. i also think i tend to have a different perspective on some aspects of transnational adoption than many transnational adoptees do so that may be part of it! but there are parts that really do speak to the fear that adoptees have to live with…? which i’m not sure is the right way to put it either. of course Operation Babylift is. well, it’s everything. but beyond that: poem titled The Last Straw with an epigraph of the headline “U.S. woman put adopted Russian son on one-way flight alone back to homeland.” says everything, and i’ve spent my whole life trying to wrap my mind around the way non-adoptees don’t understand this. plus, the poem “Did you know” and its first line “my sister was Fed-Exed from Korea?” there is something so so real about this, and the way people talk about adoption… i mean. just look at the top review of this book on goodreads (also, hate that that’s the top review and also not at all surprised because that’s just how white americans talk about adoption: also, how do you read this book and think it’s okay to say that?)
i feel like part of the challenge of being a transnational adoptee is the lack of guidance… when family history is how so many people understand the world (especially how writers narrativize their life) what does it mean to lack a family history? or for your family history to be stolen, either from you or by you. what i mean is it can feel very disorienting trying to navigate the world when there is this distance between your parents’ experience and your experience, and when you don’t belong to any culture fully. and this is exacerbated when it comes to being a poet! there’s certain blueprints (the generational blueprint, the asian american blueprint) that are not available to adoptees. so poets like nobile writing about adoption feels so very tremendous. because of nobile (and other poets like marci calabretta cancio-bello and ansley moon) there is starting to be a semblance of a literary canon/body of knowledge for adoptees. and also nobile’s notes have pointed me in the direction of other parts of this body of knowledge !
i really think the strongest parts of this collection are just the first and last poems (Moon Yeong Shin and Revisionist History, which bookend the collection so beautifully) and really, those may be the only poems i revisit. i read revisionist history before reading cleave in full, and it really is one of my favorite poems of all time maybe. i always have thought of myself as having been born in an airport! and the question of memory — “If I told you that I missed you, would you believe me? Would I?” there is something very adoptee about forgetting, about erasure but also the chosen forgettings that aren’t really a choice
i think the collection lost me at some point, honestly pretty early on. i also think i tend to have a different perspective on some aspects of transnational adoption than many transnational adoptees do so that may be part of it! but there are parts that really do speak to the fear that adoptees have to live with…? which i’m not sure is the right way to put it either. of course Operation Babylift is. well, it’s everything. but beyond that: poem titled The Last Straw with an epigraph of the headline “U.S. woman put adopted Russian son on one-way flight alone back to homeland.” says everything, and i’ve spent my whole life trying to wrap my mind around the way non-adoptees don’t understand this. plus, the poem “Did you know” and its first line “my sister was Fed-Exed from Korea?” there is something so so real about this, and the way people talk about adoption… i mean. just look at the top review of this book on goodreads (also, hate that that’s the top review and also not at all surprised because that’s just how white americans talk about adoption: also, how do you read this book and think it’s okay to say that?)
April 12, 2021
Cleave is a poetry collection of magnitude and fascination. I started reading it one evening after dinner and stayed up late with it, still reading. As one critic notes, “With breathtaking lyric beauty and formidable formal range, Nobile details the intimate effects of the international adoption industrial complex on children and parents caught up in a system’s unrelenting hunger. This is a book of remarkable compassion and real horror. Its stories will be news to many and all too familiar to others.”
I’m a domestic adoptee, and Tiana Nobile identifies as a Korean American adoptee, so there are important distinctions in our two experiences of adoption, but her stories are “all too familiar” to me.” Most, perhaps all, people who are adopted by strangers experience feelings of loss, alienation, of not fitting in.
Adoption doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The adoptee experience of loss and alienation can be exacerbated in transnational and transracial adoptions in a country like the U.S., where racism and anti-immigrant hate poison communities, families, and individuals. Tiana Nobile’s poems place a personal experience of adoption in that wider community and in a historical continuum. This is a critical book for critical times.
It’s also an aesthetically rich book, full of sensory delight in language and provocative use of many traditional elements of poetry like internal rhyme, organic form, alliteration, and startling imagery.
The poems in Cleave make expert use of a wide variety of intriguing formats. For example, in “Where Are You Really From?” Nobile employs a prose poem format that’s a list of place names in the U.S. that create a mystery narrative — one that illuminates the the empty past of people separated from family, culture, language, and history. A series of poems titled “Abstract” begin with white space, illustrating the absence of knowledge. The famous “monkey love” science experiments that separated newborn monkeys from their mothers is a recurring source of images.
Many of the poems mine science (or pseudo-science) for information on the mother-infant bond and details about fetal and infant development, a technique shared by the writer of the second book discussed here. Nobile’s poem, “Lost First Languages Leave Permanent Mark on The Brain, New Study Reveals,” uses this headline format to to introduce a meditation on what is lost:
How do I translate
the sound of my mother’s
moaning? It’s a soft wail
I hang on the wall
of my windpipe
I’m a domestic adoptee, and Tiana Nobile identifies as a Korean American adoptee, so there are important distinctions in our two experiences of adoption, but her stories are “all too familiar” to me.” Most, perhaps all, people who are adopted by strangers experience feelings of loss, alienation, of not fitting in.
Adoption doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The adoptee experience of loss and alienation can be exacerbated in transnational and transracial adoptions in a country like the U.S., where racism and anti-immigrant hate poison communities, families, and individuals. Tiana Nobile’s poems place a personal experience of adoption in that wider community and in a historical continuum. This is a critical book for critical times.
It’s also an aesthetically rich book, full of sensory delight in language and provocative use of many traditional elements of poetry like internal rhyme, organic form, alliteration, and startling imagery.
The poems in Cleave make expert use of a wide variety of intriguing formats. For example, in “Where Are You Really From?” Nobile employs a prose poem format that’s a list of place names in the U.S. that create a mystery narrative — one that illuminates the the empty past of people separated from family, culture, language, and history. A series of poems titled “Abstract” begin with white space, illustrating the absence of knowledge. The famous “monkey love” science experiments that separated newborn monkeys from their mothers is a recurring source of images.
Many of the poems mine science (or pseudo-science) for information on the mother-infant bond and details about fetal and infant development, a technique shared by the writer of the second book discussed here. Nobile’s poem, “Lost First Languages Leave Permanent Mark on The Brain, New Study Reveals,” uses this headline format to to introduce a meditation on what is lost:
How do I translate
the sound of my mother’s
moaning? It’s a soft wail
I hang on the wall
of my windpipe
Read
November 17, 2021Reading this was so?? When I saw the title of the first poem "Moon Yeong Shin" I felt a sudden flash of familiarity (or maybe something closer to recognition?). Sometimes a name is all we have, and some of us don't even have that. Parsing our korean names for meaning, for significance, for something we've lost and can't recover...
Hauntings, ghost mothers, bodies!
I almost feel like I wrote some of these poems, the way they articulate so cleanly some of my own experiences (like "Mother of Cloth"). But Nobile also comments on the larger transracial adoptee experience too, using Harlow's monkey experiments to examine love, affection, and loss. So while things felt similar to my own writing, there were also lots of instances of "I never would have thought to write about it that way, or use this to talk about that." I really liked seeing someone take a different angle!
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello and Sun Yung Shin come to mind when I think of other korean women adoptee poets (what a beautiful moutful), but Nobile's style felt closest to mine of the 3 which made this a really interesting read for me.
Favorites:
- Abstract (Mother of Ghost)
- The Last Straw
- Mother of Wood
- Personal Fiction
- Revisionist History
Hauntings, ghost mothers, bodies!
I almost feel like I wrote some of these poems, the way they articulate so cleanly some of my own experiences (like "Mother of Cloth"). But Nobile also comments on the larger transracial adoptee experience too, using Harlow's monkey experiments to examine love, affection, and loss. So while things felt similar to my own writing, there were also lots of instances of "I never would have thought to write about it that way, or use this to talk about that." I really liked seeing someone take a different angle!
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello and Sun Yung Shin come to mind when I think of other korean women adoptee poets (what a beautiful moutful), but Nobile's style felt closest to mine of the 3 which made this a really interesting read for me.
Favorites:
- Abstract (Mother of Ghost)
- The Last Straw
- Mother of Wood
- Personal Fiction
- Revisionist History
May 2, 2024
MOON YEONG SHIN
Written on the white slip at the bottom
of a polariod, cut off by the frame:
a name. Many years passed before I learned
surnames come first in Korea. I rode
my bicycle in circles around this reversal.
For years, my skin leaped from shadow to shadow.
I drank the darkness, or the darkness drank me,
but what's the difference when your veins are full
of haunting? One day I will walk
the narrow streets of many cities full of ice
freshly frozen. I will hike through forests
of wind storms newly risen. I will learn
and forget the names of many trees,
of tea leaves plucked too early in the season.
I will orbit the earth like a moon
searching for its shadow. Where does a moon
find its planet? Or is it the other way
around? To be a recently hatched egg-moon,
curved shell pinned to the sky. 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? A young animal
crawls its way out of the womb, stretches its legs,
and feels cold for the first time.
Written on the white slip at the bottom
of a polariod, cut off by the frame:
a name. Many years passed before I learned
surnames come first in Korea. I rode
my bicycle in circles around this reversal.
For years, my skin leaped from shadow to shadow.
I drank the darkness, or the darkness drank me,
but what's the difference when your veins are full
of haunting? One day I will walk
the narrow streets of many cities full of ice
freshly frozen. I will hike through forests
of wind storms newly risen. I will learn
and forget the names of many trees,
of tea leaves plucked too early in the season.
I will orbit the earth like a moon
searching for its shadow. Where does a moon
find its planet? Or is it the other way
around? To be a recently hatched egg-moon,
curved shell pinned to the sky. 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? A young animal
crawls its way out of the womb, stretches its legs,
and feels cold for the first time.
September 19, 2023
So much power packed into this slim volume of poems about adoption, belonging, and longing written in clean, evocative prose. Nobile's observations and voice cut away sentiment and self-pity, leaving the reader to simply marvel along with her as she contemplates the big questions of origin, loss, and acceptance.
October 20, 2023
A very focused collection of poetry about the experience of being a transnational adoptee. As someone who is white and not adopted, I felt like this collection was a compassionate invite to witness someone’s very personal experience about being adopted into another family, culture, and country. I’m so grateful that I got to read it. It helped expand my view and my heart.
November 22, 2025
I like this book a lot. The concept is intriguing, consistent, and compelling. Some of the lines are stupendous. I'm always interested in people's completely different reactions to a same situation. I read the paperback version though I accidentally selected the Kindle version. I like to feel a book in my hands and this one was nice to hold.
August 8, 2021
A beautiful collection that organically builds its metaphors, creating its own emotion laden imagery and tropes. Expertly ordered to reveal it's meanings in due time. Great variety of forms and found language as well as patience with/clarity around the unknown.
August 2, 2021
Beautiful. Full of moons, mothers, language.
August 31, 2025
I enjoyed the fresh images and thematic cohesion of this collection. I look forward to reading more of Nobile's work.
July 8, 2021
Such a powerful voice for this moment in America's story. As the adoptive parent of two young girls born in Asia, I dream one day my girls will be able to deliver strength in their own ways to the international adoptee community as Nobile does in CLEAVE.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews