Register the Missing

A poetic tribute to the oft-silenced grief induced by gender-based violencePublished with Kulhar Books. At the heart of Ansley Moon's spare, haunting collection of poems, Register the Missing, is a heartbreaking exploration of the often impossible choices faced by mothers and daughters in a world where over 50 million Indian girls have been lost to female infanticide, feticide and gender-based violence. Interspersed with archival documents and photographs, Moon's poems move deftly between the voices of a widow forced to relinquish her daughter, an orphaned child navigating identity and inherited loss and a chorus of unclaimed girls who remind us that "nothing stays buried, not even a daughter." Whether taking on historical tragedy and erasure or adoption or the mundanity of citizenship paperwork and mornings in a new city, Moon's poetry creates a poignant intervention against cultural silence that reminds us of the possibility of finding yourself at the very moment you thought you were lost. Ansley Moon (born 1982) is the author of How to Bury the Dead (Black Coffee Press, 2011). Moon is an adoptee and a cofounder of the Starlings Collective.