Nobile, Tiana

Tiana Nobile’s writing has appeared in Poetry Northwest, The New Republic, Guernica, and The Texas Review. A Korean American adoptee, in her debut collection Cleave (Hub City Press, 2021), Nobile grapples with the history of transnational adoption, both her own from South Korea and the broader, collective experience. Exploring psychologist Harry Harlow’s monkey experiments about maternal bonding and utilizing fragments of a highly personal cache of documents from her adoption, these poems explore dislocation, familial relationships, and the science of love and attachment. Jennifer Chang, author of The History of Anonymity and Some Say the Lark: Poems, noted that “Cleave is not only the story of a transnational adoption. Because of Tiana Nobile’s compassionate imagination and lucid discernment, Cleave becomes the story of all our lost selves, of the mothers we long for, and the languages we struggle to speak.”