It's Not Easy Being a Moth

Poetry June 2021 ISBN 978-1-936628-73-5 76 pages Softcover, 6" x 9"

Accents Publishing is proud to bring to you the first full-length poetry collection by Mark Lee Webb. It's Not Easy Being a Moth contains poems sometimes whimsical, sometimes abstract poignant or wise, but always masterfully written.

"Mark Lee Webb's It's Not Easy Being a Moth is a vivid journey through memory and transformative times, and it is voiced with a steadiness and an honesty that allow the poems' earned discoveries to further reverberate. This collection examines the intersections between youth and grief, between consciousness and intimacy, between perspective and instinct, all the while taking the care required to find the language that can simultaneously delight and haunt."—Marcus Jackson

grief

From the Book

To My GuppyWho Does Not Trust MeEnough To Pick Her Up

Just before I reach my hand into your bowl you say I'll bite. Or worse, I'll jump.

I wish my fingers were kelp and you Angelfish—
not plain grey, not like the kind they sell
in pet stores next to live-bearing platies and mollies,
but an honest-to-goodness Anacapa Angel
fish swimming off The Point where you can hide
in my kelp-fingers during the day. Or at night
how often I don't stop breathing long enough,
hold my breath long enough, float to you as long
as you tell me how near to sharks we can dive.

What Others Say

Mark Lee Webb's It's Not Easy Being a Moth is a vivid journey through memory and transformative times, and it is voiced with a steadiness and an honesty that allow the poems' earned discoveries to further reverberate. This collection examines the intersections between youth and grief, between consciousness and intimacy, between perspective and instinct, all the while taking the care required to find the language that can simultaneously delight and haunt. The poems in this book are as admirably fluent at painting landscapes as they are at creating intricate portraits of the soul and the psyche

— Marcus Jackson

Mark Lee Webb's It's Not Easy Being A Moth harnesses the verve of a bildungsroman while culling together the fragmentary memory of a West Coast childhood in the early-Seventies. Blended with vivid snapshots of adulthood, all is spread out and observed like a collection of shells gathered from a day at the beach. Some of these moments are blurred with longing and fractured with anxieties. Others are present and wholly iridescent.

— Jon Pineda

In the vast array of literary schools, Mark Lee Webb's It's Not Easy Being a Moth is a kind of Magic-Realism meets Grotesque meets Dark Humor meets Naturalism meets Theater of the Absurd. And, at times, there are even glimmers of Tragi-Comedy, moments that left this reader on the verge of both hysterical laughter and weeping. "My liver has goose bumps", Webb writes in "Mall Cool" … "and that's the organ that stays warmest / the longest after you're dead." I'm still shaking my head in wonder at that one. This collection is a must read for all serious (and even not-so-serious) poets.

— Cathy Bowers

Rub the wings / and illusion dissolves into fingertips. / You are here on a whim," writes Mark Lee Webb in his poignant new collection It's Not Easy Being A Moth. His vivid poems hold singular experiences aloft while covertly weaving them in and out of one another. Readers will feel the salt sting of ocean, the heat of misfortune, the pain of "scars too deep to be erased by a woman's own flesh …" and beg for more.

— Kari Gunter-Seymour

About the Author

Mark Lee Webb

Mark Lee Webb is a poet, photographer, and musician. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte. He has published several poetry chapbooks, and his work has appeared in literary journals such as Ninth Letter, Reed, Columbia Journal, Aeolian Harp, and many others. His photography has been selected in several juried exhibitions, such as WideOpen 2020. The Penn Review used two of his photographs for the covers of their 2019 issue. Mark is also a jazz drummer, playing regularly with The JMB Band. He makes his home in Louisville, Kentucky with his wife, folk musician Molly McCormack.