Immigrant Model

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?"

“The poems of Immigrant Model embody robust and sizzling magic—Mihaela Moscaliuc transports readers through vivid, multilayered scenes, richly startling images, and a mesmerizing gift for narrative. Here, a haunting world we would never otherwise see—our sense of history and terrain is altered forever.”
—Naomi Shihab Nye

“To paraphrase Norman Mailer, when history becomes absurd and fraught the poet must take over for the historian. Moscaliuc is such a poet. She takes on Ceausescu’s Romania as well as the aftermath of Chernobyl with a surreal, sensuous ferocity. Mouth, lips, tongue (some of the most frequently repeated words in the book) are means of survival; they devour and indict. The book’s sustained power is extraordinary.” —Stephen Dunn

"A first-rate poet . . . Memory is nourished by journeys and there's much journeying in these poems . . . What's refreshing about Moscaliuc is her relish for experiences that grant her access to lives very unlike her own and, then, the degree of attention she grants them." —London Grip Poetry Review

Mihaela Moscaliuc is the author of the poetry collection Father Dirt and translator of Carmelia Leonte’s The Hiss of the Viper. Her poems, reviews, and translations of Romanian poetry have appeared in American Poetry Review, the Georgia Review, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, and Mississippi Review, among others. Moscaliuc is the recipient of two Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Awards and a fellowship from the New Jersey Arts Council. She is an assistant professor of English at Monmouth University and teaches in the low-residency MFA program in poetry and poetry in translation at Drew University.