reviewed on June 24, 2026

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Like the hip-height of women’s jeans, the shape and style of the poetry book changes with fashion-cycle regularity.

 

Mihaela Moscaliuc’s fourth full-length book registers that cycle, situated as it is between high-waisted “project” and the midriff-baring “collection" of the early 2000s. 

 

If the book suggests a shift back, at the present moment, to the collection of occasional and observational lyrics, the idea of the project nonetheless remains central, organized as the book is around the effects and legacy of the infamous Decree 770 in Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Soviet-satellite Romania.  Under that law, abortion and contraception were heavily restricted as a means of increasing the population, forcing women into drastic measures to maintain authority over their bodies; Moscaliuc recalls, for instance, the “rubber tube ending in a ball or loop through which they squirt everything from vinegar and saline solutions to endlessly varied concoctions, to induce a miscarriage.”  “My mother is not over forty,” she writes earlier in that poem, titled “Extractions,” “and does not have more than four children.  That means she could be forced to carry what’s inside her, damaged as it may be, to term.” 

 

Though Heartmoor draws on deep wells of nostalgia for Miscaliuc’s Romanian childhood, that nostalgia is nonetheless shot-through with the terror of living under authoritarianism.  The parallels with our own moment—in which, among other atrocities, pregnant minors are routinely denied medical care, even in cases of rape and incest—are alarmingly obvious, as is the similarity in the state-sponsored policing of discourse:

 

Five thousand miles away, in Ceaușesculand,

my uncle Costică was penning epigrams.

In one, dreaming of fruit he’d never seen,

he exalted the irresistible decadence of mango flesh.

Declared state enemy for coveting "foreign elements,"

he spend the decade under house arrest.

 

Titled “The Politics of Mangoes,” that poem suggests the ways that Heartmoor—a book, after all, about crossing borders—troubles the boundary between “project book” and “collection.”  What seem to be non sequitur occasional poems or object studies, as of mangoes, reveal themselves related in understated ways to the repressions of Ceaușescu’s Romania; “Ode to the Cacao,” “In Praise of Fungi,” “While Digging for Worms,” a paean to Tara Romano’s Tone and Tease full-body workout videos: these are not the one-off observations of a “collection” but systematic celebrations of what Moscaliuc invokes—not without skepticism—as the relative freedoms of the west.

 

That skepticism is important, and important to Heartmoor, a book with one eye on Romania of the 1980s and another, as I’ve suggested, on more recent repressions.  Particularly compelling in this regard is Moscaliuc’s rehearsal of how language, literacy, and education can be coopted by and redeployed as instruments of the state.  “Typewriters are illegal,” she writes in “Extractions,” “unless they are registered with the police, so any attempt at inciting with words can be tracked down.”  “Ink comes in three colors,” she explains later, “black, blue, and red, and only superiors like my teachers are allowed to fill their stilou (fountain pen) with red.”  Linking the pedagogical stylus with the medical curette with which a friend’s mother attempts an abortion, Moscaliuc’s history leads not only to the present-day curtailment of reproductive rights but to the craven caving-in of higher education to right-wing ideology; disastrously self-righteous in their trumpeting of “diversity,” universities have scrambled over the past year to comport themselves in alignment with the state, furthering its ideological and material reach.

 

Heartmoor is not without its flaws.  There is a sometimes sentimental tendency toward the pathetic fallacy here, as well as an over-straining of imagery asked to hold too much weight.  “We slipped through the gates with the moon,” Moscaliuc writes of one dark-woods adventure, “the sister still thumbing the rope-knot / and I still enrobed in her dusk, her calves a penitential script.”  I am a limited reader, admittedly, but I can’t see it.

 

Evocative, though, of the self-reflexive treatment of place and history one encounters in Eavan Boland, its landscapes as broodingly mysterious as those of Laura Newbern, Heartmoor is a subtle and by turns searing examination of how power produces itself in invasive and intimate ways.  A 2025 Guggenheim Fellow, Moscaliuc has somehow remained outside the bounds of po-biz fashion, but the book is a vital reinvention of what the genre can achieve at the present moment.