Heartmoor
Heartmoor
Mihaela Moscaliuc
Informed by the poet’s coming of age during and immediately following Nicolae Ceaușescu’s repressive regime in Romania, Mihaela Moscaliuc’s newest collection, Heartmoor, is a lush, formally diverse collection that explores what moors and unmoors us psychologically, culturally, and spiritually. These poems reflect on in-betweenness, authoritarianism, cruelty, and complicity while still holding space for joy, wonder, and care.
The legacy of Decree 770—Romania’s notorious anti-abortion law—lingers in this collection’s engagement with women’s bodies and reproductive autonomy. Heartmoor moves through the textures of daily life—mushrooms, medicinal herbs, chocolate, family, death—and into the charged, liminal spaces where the political and personal converge. Again and again, these poems remind us that touch and connection, rituals, acts of kindness and intimacy, might be, after all, the only kind of home to which we can moor our hearts, regardless of which country we inhabit—or which inhabits us.
August 2026
ISBN: 9781949944808
Also Available on Bookshop.
Available in both print and digital formats.
Photo by Valentin Moscaliuc
Mihaela Moscaliuc is the author of the poetry collections Heartmoor (forthcoming, Alice James Books), Cemetery Ink (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021), Immigrant Model (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015) and Father Dirt (Alice James Books, 2010), translator of Liliana Ursu’s Clay and Star (Etruscan Press, 2019) and Carmelia Leonte’s The Hiss of the Viper (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2015), editor of Insane Devotion: On the Writing of Gerald Stern (Trinity University Press, 2016), and co-editor (with Michael Waters) of Fruits of the Earth (Knopf, forthcoming) and Border Lines: Poems of Migration (Knopf, 2020). In 2023, the Ecuadorian press El Ángel published a collection of her poems in Spanish (Algunos poemas fugitivos) in the translation of Frances Simán. She has published scholarship in the field of Romani Studies, on issues of representation, appropriation, exophony and code-switching, and on the works of Kimiko Hahn, Agha Shahid Ali, and Colum McCann.
Moscaliuc has received two Glenna Luschei Awards from Prairie Schooner, a 2024 Pushcart prize, residency fellowships from The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, MacDowell, Rockvale Writers' Colony, and Le Chateau de Lavigny (Switzerland), Dairy Hollow, two Individual Artist Fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and a Fulbright fellowship to Romania. She is graduate program director and professor of English at Monmouth University (New Jersey) and translation editor for Plume.
Previous Praise:
On Cemetery Ink:
Moscaliuc’s poems are indeed like bodies themselves, alive with history, alive with mourning, alive with the images and pop culture phrases that populate our shared knowing. They are composed from the atoms of accumulated trauma and joy, from intimacies stored in cells, coursing through nerves and arteries. Her stories are told not through narrative, but through confluence, synthesis, conflation; flesh in words, the soul historicized and vital. . . .The body of motherhood—mitigated, distressed, mutilated, and policed—becomes a haunted refrain in Moscaliuc’s work."
—Heavy Feather Review, Sarah D’Stair
On Immigrant Model:
"To paraphrase Norman Mailer, when history becomes absurd and fraught, the poet must take over for the historian. Moscaliuc is such a poet."
—Stephen Dunn, author of Pagan Virtues and Keeper of Limits
On Father Dirt:
I love Mihaela Moscaliuc's tenderness—and her ruthlessness—a strange combination, except for a poet, for they both are products of language, language and the other "L," love, which poets above all others have a way of "collecting together" so that experience, luck, skill, and determination may sometimes combine to produce a poem. Another way of putting it is that the poem comes from the heart, an organ poets have that is located in the mind. (…) She is a superb new writer, extraordinarily gifted."
—World Literature Today, Gerald Stern
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