Slave Moth: A Narrative in Verse

by Thylias Moss

Overview

Named by Black Issues as the best poetry book of 2004, this is the astonishing story of a slave girl in the antebellum South.

This critically acclaimed verse-novel follows the unforgettable Varl, a slave on a plantation in Tennessee, on her path to freedom. Wise beyond her years and wildly creative, Varl must choose between the only life she's knownher Mamalee, her friends (especially her beloved Dob), the farmland she's explored since childhoodand her growing need for self-determination. Standing in her path, waiting to quash her spirit, is her master, the cunning Peter Perry, "a collector of rare things" who aims to add Varl herself to his perverse assortment of oddities.

With Slave Moth, Thylias Moss shows herself yet again to be "a visionary storyteller" (Charles Simic). Written in gorgeous verse, it is an explosion of life in the face of servitude.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780892553181
Publisher:	Persea
Publication date:	08/17/2006
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Thylias Moss is the author of six previous volumes of poetry. Her Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler was a National Critics Book Circle Award finalist, and was named by the Village Voice as one of "Our Favorite Books of 1998." A 1996 Fellow of the MacArthur Foundation and a recipient of a Whiting Writer's Award, Moss has received grants from, among others, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Kenan Charitable Trust. She is Professor of English at the University of Michigan, and lives in Ann Arbor.