Register the Missing

Cover Art by Chitra Ganesh

“There is a violence in remembering,” Ansley Moon writes in their spectacular debut. With a deft control of lyricism, with the terrifying language of reportage, Moon makes visible violence towards girls and women. This brutality, this erasure is ongoing; it ruptures families, it structures society. Moon is speaking to us, but also to women and girls lost to misogyny. In the darkness, Moon finds glimmers of beauty, hope. “May you know your body / May your life be gentle.” These poems are communal, defiant, and unforgettable. –Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine and Slow Lighting

Ansley Moon's haunting and darkly exquisite collection Register the Missing is a relentless search through documented and missing histories of The Daughter, through memory and its absence, known and unknown. Moon alchemizes their grief into aching currents that undulate through a ghost archive, not just a victim to a buried violence, but a historian of the self, the scribe, the surveyor of a redacted past, transcribing it all in the shadows. –Muriel Leung, author of How to Fall in Love In a Time of Unnameable Disaster and Imagine Us, The Swarm

“What happens to the children forced to life against parental betrayal whether through abandonment, female infanticide, or to an adoption industry that for capital, preys upon children from the Global South. Imagine one of these children growing into sharp, scorching poetry. This is what Ansley Moon achieves in Register the Missing. Through formal technique and direct second-person address Moon voices the silent self’s grief into a determined reimagining of the intimacies that willow various aspects of state and familial violence to proliferate.” –Rajiv Mohabir, author of Sea Beast and translator of I Even Regret the Night: Holi Songs of Demerara by Lalbihari Sharma

Register the Missing is memory work, elegy, invocation, and a topography of the ghost country in which many erased people exist. This is a keen-eyed book about girls, women, violent displacements, and the cost of these disappearances. Moon has written vividly into the spaces of forbidden evidence as they evoke the anguish and fury of 50 million missing girls who have been denied fellowship among the living and the legitimate. These arresting, beautiful poems are physically embodied and spiritually austere; they feel joined together with “bright fractures of light.” The voices here refuse an inheritance of silence; they confront readers with the facts of their abandonment and the collective hunger of their desires. – Sun Yung Shin, author of Wet Hex and Heart Eater