Books
A unique anthology of poems from around the world and through the ages that celebrate fruits, vegetables, grains, nuts, and spices, and their meaning in our lives
Ever since Eve plucked a tempting apple in the Garden of Eden, the fruits of the earth have been essential to human culture and the stories we tell about our world. Poets from ancient times to the present have celebrated the harvest of our gardens, fields, and orchards.
The delectable cornucopia of poems harvested in this volume includes many beloved old chestnuts, such as Robert Frost’s “After Apple-Picking,” Emily Dickinson’s “Forbidden fruit a flavor has,” Gwendolyn Brooks’s “The Bean Eaters,” and the famous chilled plums in William Carlos Williams’s “This Is Just to Say.” But there are many other delights to discover as well: Pablo Neruda’s “Ode to the Artichoke,” Seamus Heaney’s “Blackberry Picking,” Jane Hirshfield’s “Green-Striped Melons,” Eugenio Montale’s “The Lemons,” Charles Simic’s “Watermelons,” Paul Valéry’s “Pomegranates,” Nâzim Hikmet’s “The Cucumber,” Rita Dove’s “Parsley,” Sylvia Plath’s “Mushrooms,” and Michael Ondaatje’s “The Cinnamon Peeler.” Peaches, figs, asparagus, olives, onions, peppers, nuts, coffee, chocolate, saffron, and nutmeg—the range of subjects is sure to whet the appetites of poetry lovers everywhere.
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Border Lines
April 2020
Cemetery Ink
April 2021
In poems of compassion and social justice, Mihaela Moscaliuc probes borders and memory to work through, and further complicate, understandings of belonging—from places (including her native Romania) and histories, to ways of knowing, loving, and grieving. If the wounded populate these poems, so too do goats, black swans, centipedes, dismembered dolls, and wandering wombs. The ekphrastic sequence on Rousseau’s The Sleeping Gypsy honors stories of Roma people while addressing issues of (mis)representation and epistemic violence. As in previous collections, cemeteries become sites of power, holding the living accountable.
Insane Devotion
On the Writing of Gerald Stern
(Edited by Mihaela Moscaliuc)
June 2016
Gerald Stern has been a significant presence in the literary constellation of his generation and an impassioned and idiosyncratic voice in twentieth- and twenty-first-century American poetry. In this retrospective of Stern's career, fourteen writers, critics, and poets examine the themes, stylistic traits, and craft of a poet who has shaped and inspired American verse for generations.
Immigrant Model
January 2015
The poems in Immigrant Model explore issues of individual and communal identity in the face of conflict, conflicting “truths” or histories, and uprootedness. They explore the notion of homeland as it relates to one’s roots, adopted space, psychological terrain, gendered body. If the book reads as a collage of voices or shards rather than as a book with an identifiable arc, it’s because that’s the only way the poet has managed to answer, so far, the question, “What is it like to be of this world and this world and this world, while also of the elsewhere skirting these worlds?”
Father Dirt
January 2010
Mihaela Moscaliuc's lyric debut unveils Communist and post-Communist Romanian life, recounting experiences and landscapes like a true wanderer. Romantic and spellbinding, her quest to understand language, origin, and country unites celebration with mourning, the sacred with the profane, apathy with compassion.
Clay and Star
2019
In Clay and Star, Romanian poet Liliana Maria Ursu captures with breathtaking precision the convergence of the sacred with the mundane. Whether anchored in Sibiu, Visby, Skala, or San Francisco, her poems both honor and transcend place and time as they search obsessively for essence, truths, self-knowledge, and the divine within.