[08/11/26] Moscaliuc, Mihaela: Heartmoor

Alice James Books, paperback

Publication Date: August 11, 2026

Publisher Marketing: 

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.