The Moan Wilds - Paperback

by Caroline Rayner (Author), Emma Ensley (Illustrator)

THE MOAN WILDS is a long poem.

Lighting fireworks in the yard during a party, then escaping into the house to cut your hair in the bathtub, or down the road to where everyone promised you could perfectly see the moon. Sharing a bottle of wine while riding through the Blue Ridge Mountains in the back of a station wagon with no air conditioning and nothing but weather and sports on the radio. It's writing each other's names on the windows with melting lipstick. Putting glitter on your eyes. Crossing your legs over her legs to make a move on a giant rock in the river. Getting blood on your dress. Sweating in pink sheets until noon with someone you got to sing "Someday I Will Treat You Good" then "Trains Across the Sea" then "Farewell Transmission" with at karaoke. Yelling on the phone from the porch about a psychedelic kind of light coming in like water but also like velvet through the magnolia that everyone needs to see to believe and we can make a whole goddamn night out of it if someone goes to get more wine.

Praise for THE MOAN WILDS:

Here we have a book of the excruciating intoxication of passionate, ardent, not altogether unrequited love. Wine, honey, gin, benedictine, champagne, orange wine, bourbon, tequila, velvet and silk, meat, magnolia, ass, angel, bird dog, moon, swamp and shocks lay its grounds. It's going to be magnificent and it's going to end in wreckage. Rayner's not holding anything back and the music of her words and the beauty of her soul makes it all bearable.

- Dara Barrois/Dixon, née Dara Wier, author of REVERSE RAPTURE, YOU GOOD THING, and TOLSTOY KILLED ANNA KARENINA

The Moan Wilds is a queer feast. Everything is on the table. The table is in the ditch and the ditch is illuminated by Magnolia Fever light and the light heaves out a Psalter and the Psalter generates humidity and the humidity is a ghost and the ghost's name is Desire. Caroline Rayner can write lines that stop your heart or rather, relocate it. This long-awaited book vibrates with brilliance. She writes, "Is experimental what you mean, because/what I mean is devotional." Hallelujah.

- Selah Saterstrom, author of Ideal Suggestions and Slab

"Steeped in the hybrid and maximalist tradition of C.D. Wright, Bernadette Mayer, and Alice Notley, The Moan Wilds nevertheless forges a path so inimitable it becomes the very thumbprint of its author, which to me is the crowning achievement of any book worth its salt. Here Rayner has produced an indelible and unforgettable voice, full of heart, intelligence, hunger and a wildness that shakes us into new, hallucinatory order. In other words, it's fucking awesome".

- Ocean Vuong, author of Time Is a Mother and On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous