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Moth Funerals
"Can Gaia Rajan just tell us every story? With a voice that is forever lyrical yet foreboding, Rajan is the present and the future of poetry. Moth Funerals is a stunning debut that urges us to retell our own futures: this is the future where the love story is rewritten, where godless girls are safe, where these remarkable girls build their own dollhouses and every single one of their worldly wants is quenched, and where these girls are more than just a lyric to a song — in fact, they don't just rule the song — they rule the world. This collection urges us to escape our frameworks and reconstruct right now. Gaia Rajan gives me power."
— Dorothy Chan, author of Revenge of the Asian Woman and Attack of the Fifty-Foot Centerfold
— Dorothy Chan, author of Revenge of the Asian Woman and Attack of the Fifty-Foot Centerfold
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Published January 1, 2020
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April 28, 2025
Poetry is often a path to transformation. It is the distillation of the abstract maelstrom of emotions inside us, translated into fallible yet malleable language in order to observe, access, and process it in the hopes of learning, growing, and becoming who we are becoming. ‘The truth is/ my first love had to be/ myself,’ writes Gaia Rajan in her debut collection of poetry, Moth Funerals, and it is through loving ourselves or at least an acceptance of self that the process of transformation can finally begin. Still a teenager at the time of publication of this first chapbook, Rajan was already demonstrating an incredible early promise for formative verse and transformative thought, weaving the reader through metaphors of metamorphosis in poems written as self-portraits as cocoons and moths. ‘You will ache yourself a world full of invented languages,’ she writes, and in the spaces of language we find that Rajan—through insightful investigations of identity, heritage, and desire—invents herself and shares it so we, too, can join in the journey of growth. It is a spectacular little read.
Poem In Which I Do Not Become A Bird
I like how the internet unfurls when you consider dying —
how every website breaks open to offer
phone numbers, statistics, names, how you look out
into the streetlights and imagine everyone clutching their breath,
same as you. How all your pockets are weighed
with sea, how when the hotline is yours
finally a bodiless voice whispers it gets better,
which is what people say when they do not know
what to do with their hands. Your thoughts ache
a bestiary of wings and teeth and how
your friend died on a river. Then the dream
where he is alone with an armful of birds,
and they are leading him closer to the water —
never mind. I don't want to think about the birds who died
of blunt force trauma, the birds who disappeared
during his last rites, the birds reminding me I am
wingless. Have you ever seen
an armful of birds? I like metaphors because they unflight
humanity, turn it to godhood. I know
the truth. His death was his death, his life his life, the birds
just birds, I surrender
my weapons. I forfeit my mouths. The road
is strewn with rain and cars, and I am not a metaphor,
I'm just a girl kneeling small enough to live
for a moment, the city's breath feathered
as I bury my pleas in the dark.
There is a real urgency to these poems which, like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon, break free from the typical structural confines of language and take flight across the page. Rajan experiments with form and language with a delightful deftness and intellect that brings both the mind and heart along for the ride. ‘I wring my myths open,’ she writes in these visceral confrontations of the self and all the possibilities or people others wish she were as she ‘strings ghosts up on the wall like lights,’ and poems upon the page like lighthouses.
‘I’m trapped in here I don’t want
to be free anymore I just want you
to know me I can’t speak and you
imagine wings that flutter pretty from my lips
green like dead-body phosphorus pretty
enough to forget anything ever happened’
—from [self-portrait as cocoon]
In order to fly, she must find herself. But who is that self she wonders and searches through her verses. ‘To make the body a country, one must tear/ away its wings,’ she writes in [self-portrait as moth] and the conflict of the body and identity with heritage and national identity come screaming out. Othered in the United States yet estranged from India and the home of her heritage, ‘silent and running and there is no country / to belong to.’ The conflicts of self in a country that is unwelcoming to ideas of plurality and progressiveness are also tackled, such as in the rather haunting poem Nostalgia Is The Prettiest Liar:
‘I sit in the dark and watch a white woman cosplay 1930. She says
it must’ve been simpler back then, incants it with the air
of a prayer, smiles and snaps white gloves on. Grayscale televisions
that volt static like lightning. A bride lacing a corset up her back
with knives. They say if your hands were darker than the white gloves,
you were sent to a different immigration center. They say
the alternate centers ordered more coffins than water. There’s a study
in which rhesus monkeys, separated from their mothers, pick soft linen
over food. The monkeys weren’t named until they died. The white woman
likes old cars and borders. Says transformative with the confidence
of an executioner. A judge, separating another child from its mother,
says I don’t remember your names but I’m sorry, there’s nothing
I can do. Calls us doomed in the same voice he lists his bills,
the groceries. The white woman owns fifty pairs of ivory-white
gloves. There’s a study in which ten people, left alone in an empty room,
recall their ghosts so clearly the room begins to shake, so clearly
a table leg smashes against the wall, so clearly a voice from their memories
weaves like a noose into the smooth cages of their skulls.
Only some can imagine the past and see a mission. The white
woman’s nostalgia flicks blond lights on in the city and rides
over skyscrapers, littering the earth with smoke, with glass.
Her nostalgia flays open a past for remaking. Her nostalgia
spears peaches at the dinner table, blood seeping out onto the plate,
and it drinks until crimson smears down its jaw, drinks until
blood rushes to its eyelids, drinks and drinks and’
A remarkable collection from such a young poet, Moth Funerals by Gaia Rajan is an absolute delight. Short yet punchy and sure to linger in the mind, this was quite the lovely read that reminds us that we are all humans under a perpetual state of construction and our confrontations with the self are the avenues towards our futures. In her craft towards transformation and cocoon imagery I am reminded of the poem Waking from Ursula K. Le Guin which concludes 'in the grey cocoon of light the mind / finds metamorphosis, / makes from the wreck of what she was / the wings of what she is.' Let these poems be a cocoon for your heart from which we can be released, better, brighter, more free than before. Moth Funerals is a marvel.
4.5/5
Promise me–
our bodies will always remember
what was taken.
We will loot it back
forever, reaching behind the glass,
ours & ours & ours:
—from When I Dream I Dream of Diamonds
Poem In Which I Do Not Become A Bird
I like how the internet unfurls when you consider dying —
how every website breaks open to offer
phone numbers, statistics, names, how you look out
into the streetlights and imagine everyone clutching their breath,
same as you. How all your pockets are weighed
with sea, how when the hotline is yours
finally a bodiless voice whispers it gets better,
which is what people say when they do not know
what to do with their hands. Your thoughts ache
a bestiary of wings and teeth and how
your friend died on a river. Then the dream
where he is alone with an armful of birds,
and they are leading him closer to the water —
never mind. I don't want to think about the birds who died
of blunt force trauma, the birds who disappeared
during his last rites, the birds reminding me I am
wingless. Have you ever seen
an armful of birds? I like metaphors because they unflight
humanity, turn it to godhood. I know
the truth. His death was his death, his life his life, the birds
just birds, I surrender
my weapons. I forfeit my mouths. The road
is strewn with rain and cars, and I am not a metaphor,
I'm just a girl kneeling small enough to live
for a moment, the city's breath feathered
as I bury my pleas in the dark.
There is a real urgency to these poems which, like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon, break free from the typical structural confines of language and take flight across the page. Rajan experiments with form and language with a delightful deftness and intellect that brings both the mind and heart along for the ride. ‘I wring my myths open,’ she writes in these visceral confrontations of the self and all the possibilities or people others wish she were as she ‘strings ghosts up on the wall like lights,’ and poems upon the page like lighthouses.
‘I’m trapped in here I don’t want
to be free anymore I just want you
to know me I can’t speak and you
imagine wings that flutter pretty from my lips
green like dead-body phosphorus pretty
enough to forget anything ever happened’
—from [self-portrait as cocoon]
In order to fly, she must find herself. But who is that self she wonders and searches through her verses. ‘To make the body a country, one must tear/ away its wings,’ she writes in [self-portrait as moth] and the conflict of the body and identity with heritage and national identity come screaming out. Othered in the United States yet estranged from India and the home of her heritage, ‘silent and running and there is no country / to belong to.’ The conflicts of self in a country that is unwelcoming to ideas of plurality and progressiveness are also tackled, such as in the rather haunting poem Nostalgia Is The Prettiest Liar:
‘I sit in the dark and watch a white woman cosplay 1930. She says
it must’ve been simpler back then, incants it with the air
of a prayer, smiles and snaps white gloves on. Grayscale televisions
that volt static like lightning. A bride lacing a corset up her back
with knives. They say if your hands were darker than the white gloves,
you were sent to a different immigration center. They say
the alternate centers ordered more coffins than water. There’s a study
in which rhesus monkeys, separated from their mothers, pick soft linen
over food. The monkeys weren’t named until they died. The white woman
likes old cars and borders. Says transformative with the confidence
of an executioner. A judge, separating another child from its mother,
says I don’t remember your names but I’m sorry, there’s nothing
I can do. Calls us doomed in the same voice he lists his bills,
the groceries. The white woman owns fifty pairs of ivory-white
gloves. There’s a study in which ten people, left alone in an empty room,
recall their ghosts so clearly the room begins to shake, so clearly
a table leg smashes against the wall, so clearly a voice from their memories
weaves like a noose into the smooth cages of their skulls.
Only some can imagine the past and see a mission. The white
woman’s nostalgia flicks blond lights on in the city and rides
over skyscrapers, littering the earth with smoke, with glass.
Her nostalgia flays open a past for remaking. Her nostalgia
spears peaches at the dinner table, blood seeping out onto the plate,
and it drinks until crimson smears down its jaw, drinks until
blood rushes to its eyelids, drinks and drinks and’
A remarkable collection from such a young poet, Moth Funerals by Gaia Rajan is an absolute delight. Short yet punchy and sure to linger in the mind, this was quite the lovely read that reminds us that we are all humans under a perpetual state of construction and our confrontations with the self are the avenues towards our futures. In her craft towards transformation and cocoon imagery I am reminded of the poem Waking from Ursula K. Le Guin which concludes 'in the grey cocoon of light the mind / finds metamorphosis, / makes from the wreck of what she was / the wings of what she is.' Let these poems be a cocoon for your heart from which we can be released, better, brighter, more free than before. Moth Funerals is a marvel.
4.5/5
Promise me–
our bodies will always remember
what was taken.
We will loot it back
forever, reaching behind the glass,
ours & ours & ours:
—from When I Dream I Dream of Diamonds
January 1, 2021
Gaia Rajan is one of my favorite poets. She stings you and then treats the wound; she strips you of what you thought you knew about girlhood. This collection is one of the best debuts I've ever read.
January 21, 2021
Moth Funerals is the type of collection that haunts you over and over again with its imagery. The poems in this chapbook patch up old wounds but leave new ones. Gaia Rajan masterfully weaves together everything from Rhesus monkeys to Hey There Delilah to (of course,) moths, and spins it into a story about mortality, perseverance, and womanhood. This collection is exactly what a collection should be — a selection of poetry equally varied and interconnected.
Rajan writes:
This debut collection is far from "aimless beauty". It is unafraid to draw inspiration from both past and present, and finds powerful words to bridge gaps between lineages and realities. Moth Funerals is beautiful enough to be pointed at and called a cathedral in its own right.
Rajan writes:
"you will ache yourself a world full of invented languages,
aimless beauty, sweet smoke, and you will point at anything
beautiful and name it a cathedral"
This debut collection is far from "aimless beauty". It is unafraid to draw inspiration from both past and present, and finds powerful words to bridge gaps between lineages and realities. Moth Funerals is beautiful enough to be pointed at and called a cathedral in its own right.
February 12, 2021
The poems in Moth Funerals are full of fluttering wings and ghost girls, homelands and blood. In this chapbook, we encounter quiet funeral after funeral, but also formations of a creature emerging from a chrysalis, becoming themselves.
Gaia's chapbook took me on a journey and brought me towards the light, and I'm all the better for it.
Gaia's chapbook took me on a journey and brought me towards the light, and I'm all the better for it.
February 23, 2021
Moth Funerals might quite possibly be the greatest chapbook of poetry that I have ever been fortunate to read. Gaia Rajan is a masterful poet that just churns out amazing poetry at every turn. I might start passing this chap out like zines because it is so good !!
January 11, 2021
One of the greatest examples of coming of age, set in verse. The way that Gaia writes is absolutely timeless.
September 7, 2023
A solid debut chapbook from 16YO poet Gaia Rajan. Covering topics as identity, family, prejudice, and growing up a WOC in America.
from Poem Inside A Locker Room: "This kiss / could turn a daughter to grave. Girl, I / am bad at forgiveness, I kiss my monsters, I don't / believe in safety."
from The Radium Girls: "Beauty is a debt / we pay from birth, our bodies servants // to their shadow. We paint until our nails scream / at their seams, shine until our secrets ash // between our lips. This is how a woman becomes / a mouth. Say we could be dangerous."
from Poem Inside A Locker Room: "This kiss / could turn a daughter to grave. Girl, I / am bad at forgiveness, I kiss my monsters, I don't / believe in safety."
from The Radium Girls: "Beauty is a debt / we pay from birth, our bodies servants // to their shadow. We paint until our nails scream / at their seams, shine until our secrets ash // between our lips. This is how a woman becomes / a mouth. Say we could be dangerous."
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews