Stancek, Claire Marie: Operating Moon

Pinsapo, paperback

Publication Date: April 15, 2026

Publisher Marketing: Claire Marie Stancek's Operating Moon explores the fractured relationships between body, institution, and agency. Some of the poems collage Stancek's own medical record with an index of children's poetry in a visually simultaneous, bibliomantic fugue that constellates maternal care with bureaucratized and medicalized care. Some of the poems split open the sonnet form in a series of "double sonnets," 14-line poems which are burst apart across a wide midline caesura, like an embryo splitting into twins, or a body sliced open during surgery. Feminist and experimental, personal and political, Operating Moon sings through and alongside a maternal line, while engaging the complex violences of care systems.

"This book proceeds like a series of incisions into the haunted wood traversed by an expectant mother. With 'scalpel' and 'apple blossom,' Claire Marie Stancek deftly cuts and lifts the body of language itself. This swoon-worthy, incantatory book, mixes nursery rhymes, etymologies and automated institutional intake forms—into a fabric of mesmerizing lines. With sonic brilliance and 'red with blooded howl'—'obey O baby'! Here comes the live birth of the newest poems of ancient mystery, overflowing with all the pleasure and complexity of 'cloud striated honey.' Stancek’s adroit blade enters the garment, wherein blooms a red rose that is the same as an 'operating moon.'" —Laynie Browne