Cemetery Ink

Reviews / Votes

Objective, authentic, and ultimately vulnerable . . . without affect or strain, an intensity found only in the greatest poems. * Brooklyn Rail * Shifting spaces and beings move furiously through the remarkable poetry of Mihaela Moscaliuc. Passageways writhe into and back from realms of the dead, and from the rubble of a layered underworld and a nearly ruined surface, we hear a range of voices, and return bearing their star-essences or their soil on our skin. Moscaliuc's ravaged earth-plane breathes poems radiant and visionary. * Pleiades * Moscaliuc's poems are . . . 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. * Heavy Feather Review * Cemetery Ink takes you on a poetic journey to various places, such as psychiatric hospitals, haunted islands, goat pastures, streets teeming with homeless women, and invites you to reflect on oil paintings, cemeteries, and the history of massacres. The poems pop up like websites, and the readers choose how far deep they wish to surf for meaning. * New York Journal of Books * At the very opening of Cemetery Ink I hit the phrase 'the penal colony in our ribcage.' Or rather, it hit me, and I handed myself over to the wisdom, fearlessness, and verbal verve of this poet. Moscaliuc is a poet in the middle of her journey, but an old soul. 'May you preserve the wisdom with which you arrive,' she tells an unborn son, and I sense she has taken pains to do just that herself. In 'Maggot Therapy' she borrows the personae of three young women in a Romanian psychiatric hospital. 'I hold the raddled deck,' she says in the voice of the fortune teller. She admires the 'silky bagworm nest fastened so ingeniously to the apple branch.' With a novelist's grasp of a social system and a poet's attention to form and flesh, Moscaliuc has filled her poems with life, death, suffering, pleasure, and power. -- Alicia Ostriker Listen for the forward-motion in syncopations that pause only briefly in death-knell, prayer, and spell. We seem to travel in visceral time with the poet's hands and eyes. Moscaliuc's gorgeous visual work creates a speeding Bruegelesque world-in-transit: cinematic, yes, but also deeply tactile, in moments which feel somehow stilled in the immortal. -- Judith Vollmer