A Rona Jaffe Foundation award winner, Nobile is a glimmering new talent. Cleave attempts to unknot the complexities of adoptee childhood, revealing a nature of opposites—”the child cleaved to her mother / the child cleaved from her mother”—while reckoning with the histories that make us. The first time I belonged to a woman, my body a fresh bulb broken off at the root. She kept me for six months, watched spit bubble from my pursed lips. I wonder if she ever claimed me,if she rocked me to sleep on her chest, if she wiped my mouth gently saying,