The Night We Landed on the Moon
Debra Marquart’s newest memoir, an assemblage of essays, explores the space
between states of exile and belonging, the seemingly irresolvable dilemma of the
restless homebody. Marquart was born into a family of land-loving people―farmers
known as the ethnic group Germans-from-Russia―who had emigrated from Russia to
the United States between 1886 and 1911 and taken up land claims in Dakota Territory.
Her grandparents tended their farms and fields, never dreaming of moving another inch
away from the homes they had made. By contrast, Marquart grew up a restless,
imaginative child in that same agricultural place, yearning to strike out for places more
interesting as soon as she was old enough to take flight. All seemed simple enough
until Marquart realized that her family’s stubborn attachment to place grew out of a
traumatic multi-generational history of flight, migration, dispossession, and exile from
their previous homelands in Europe. Her grandfathers and all her great-grandparents
had emigrated to the United States from villages in south Russia, along the Black Sea.
And, in a familial pattern going back several more generations, their own great-
grandparents had experienced a traumatic uprooting one hundred years earlier when
they fled the Rhine region of western Europe on the run from the chaos of the French
Revolution. Her more distant ancestors had migrated east along the Danube in 1803 to
reach their land claims in south Russia, just as her more immediate ancestors had fled
their villages in south Russia to come west to America. As Marquart researched her
family history, the revelation about multi-generational patterns of forcible removal from
homelands helped her to contextualize her own complicated relationship with ideas of
exile and belonging. She realized she came by her restlessness honestly, an American
kid weaned on wanderlust and the promise of education calling her to leave home and
never return. In The Night We Landed on the Moon, Marquart works out the tensions
between divergent impulses―the restlessness in the feet to always move forward into
the world, mixed with the opposing desire to turn around, look back, and sometimes
even settle in and claim to belong.
Debra Marquart is a Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State
University and Iowa's Poet Laureate. She is the Senior Editor of Flyway: Journal of
Writing & Environment. A memoirist, poet, and musician, Marquart is the author of six
books including an environmental memoir of place, The Horizontal World: Growing Up
Wild in the Middle of Nowhere and a collection of poems, Small Buried Things: Poems.
Marquart's work has been featured on NPR and the BBC and has received over fifty
grants and awards including an NEA Fellowship, a PEN USA Award, a New York Times
Editors' Choice commendation, Elle Magazine's Elle Lettres Award, and most recently,
she was named a 2021 Poet Laureate Fellow by the Academy of American Poets.
Sacrament of Bodies
2021 Lambda Literary Awards Finalist
In this groundbreaking collection of poems, Sacrament of Bodies, Romeo Oriogun
fearlessly interrogates how a queer man in Nigeria can heal in a society where
everything is designed to prevent such restoration. With honesty, precision, tenderness
of detail, and a light touch, Oriogun explores grief and how the body finds survival
through migration.
Romeo Oriogun, a Nigerian poet and essayist, is the author of Sacrament of Bodies
(University of Nebraska Press) and three chapbooks. He is the winner of the 2017
Brunel International African Poetry Prize. A finalist for the Lambda Prize for poetry and
for The Future Awards African Prize for Literature, Oriogun has received fellowships
and support from Ebedi International Writers Residency, Harvard University, Hutchins
Center for African and African American Research, Oregon Institute for Creative
Research, and the IIE- Artist Protection Fund. His poems have appeared in Poetry,
Harvard Review, American Poetry Review, Poetry London, The Poetry Review,
Narrative Magazine, The Common, and others. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’
Workshop, his poems have been translated into several languages.