Heartmoor

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.

Mihaela Moscaliuc was born and raised in Romania. She is the author of the poetry collections Heartmoor (Alice James Books, forthcoming 2026), 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, 2014), editor of Insane Devotion: On the Writing of Gerald Stern (Trinity University Press, 2016), and co-editor of Fruits of the Earth: Harvest Poems (Knopf, 2025) and Border Lines: Poems of Migration (Knopf, 2020). A 2025 Guggenheim Fellow, she is the recipient of two Pushcart Prizes; two Individual Artist Fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts; a Fulbright fellowship; two Glenna Luschei Awards from Prairie Schooner, and residency fellowships from Hawthornden Foundation (Italy), Chateau de Lavigny (Switzerland), Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and MacDowell. Moscaliuc directs the M.A. Program in English at Monmouth University (New Jersey), where she teaches creative writing and literature https: //www.mmoscaliuc.com/