Los Angeles Review of Books Review by Rigoberto González:
She Has A Name works with great sensitivity in its invitation to readers to empathize with an experience that’s largely and unnecessarily hidden from public discourse.[...]A compassionate writer with a delicate touch, Moon navigates emotive territory with commendable grace.Jewish Currents Magazine Review by Janlori Goldman:
With her own name a poem, Kamilah Aisha Moon enters the published world with a stunning first book, a collection of poems so wrought, honest, and compassionate that I will return to them, learn from them, and surely continue to be moved by this poet’s essential voice.
The Volta blog by safia jama:
Moon’s collage of loss, grief, and gratitude reveals a family that is undeniably close and poems that feel absolutely necessary...Moon’s poetry reveals the work of years—both on and off the page—though the truth in her poems may appear effortless to the untrained eye.
Muzzle Magazine by Lindsay King-Miller:
From the beginning, through Moon's spare, almost conversational, but deceptively evocative language, the reader understands this to be a story of both love and loneliness, of a distance that can never be fully traversed...this is a myth with no heroes, only people trying to be heroic for the sake of those they love.
The Rumpus By Melissa Leigh Gore:
Via a steady injection of iconography among the details of family life, Kamilah Aisha Moon’s debut weaves a kaleidoscopic set of poems with intimate insight and textural multiplicity.
Poetry Foundation Reading List 2014 by danez smith:
To say this book is about ability is ignoring the fact that this is a book about family, about love, about home, about compassion, about independence, about humans making their own way in a world of too many and not enough roads to take. Bless this book.
If You Only Read Three Books of Poetry...(from My 2013 in Reading post by Roxane Gay)
Superstition Review's Founding Editor, Patricia Colleen Murphy:
I’m also so pleased with the work we featured in Issue 10. Am I allowed to pick favorites in my own magazine? It feels a bit like picking favorites in my own house. Okay you all know Rooster is my favorite Vizsla, so who am I kidding. I have a favorite in Issue 10 and it is the essay Rikers Island Workshop by Kamilah Aisha Moon. This is such a poignant and moving and generous and thoughtful account of Kamilah’s work teaching poetry at Rikers Island Prison. This essay does what I want all writing to do: it makes me empathize completely with everyone in it. I feel like I’m there. And I care about everyone around me. I aspire to write like Kamilah, with such honesty and clarity.
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From writer Mary Austin Speaker's account of the Bryant Park Reading:
Kamilah Aisha Moon, known as Aisha to her friends, kicked off the reading with Laure-Anne's poem, "Friends," to much applause. Aisha's reading took a firmly narrative stance, offering poems that often seemed to share space with a rich, intimate memoir. Many of her poems centered around the specter of her sister's autism, the first poem, "11/1/77" describing the indelicacy of her sister's birthing physician, an excruciating poem that plumbed the violence of childbirth and the long shadows cast by a careless delivery. She followed with "Borderless Country," a lyric poem with a statistical refrain: "1 in 150" (according to the Washington Post, the number of children who suffer from autism). But the bulk of Aisha's reading was taken up with a long poem in the voices of various family members. Forging an intersticial space between the character-driven theatricality of a play and the lyric interiority of a poem, Aisha offered a series of meditations on difficulty, leaving her audience with a palpable sense of the shape of the family dynamic and how it had formed itself around its most difficult endeavor— the raising of her autistic sister. The poem was unflinchingly honest, and reminded me of Amy Lemmon's recent book, Saint Nobody, which takes on the complexity of raising a child with Down's Syndrome. One of Aisha's last lines on the subject veered toward an earnest confession, a kind of lament— "each visit home frays me / the price I pay for being able to drive away." This type of poem can, I think, open up dialogues about disease and treatment, and I was grateful to hear such a complex rendering of such a (for most) unimaginable task.