Rebuilding without Pattern

The very sap of life flows in Mihaela Moscaliuc’s poetry volume, Immigrant Model. If there is such a thing as tangible poetry, poetry that feels alive, this writer is one who has crafted it in her second book, a befitting follow-up to her first volume, Father Dirt (2010). She has found her own way to mold realities out of words, words that are at once savorous, earthy, delicate, merciless, evocative, mournful, and apocalyptic. Stepping into the world of this poetry collection feels almost like an intrusion into a space and time of mythological proportions, to which the poems’ voices are the sole witnesses. This world, these stories, these scattered life pieces sewn together with the unifying thread that is the theme of immigration can only be told this way, in this book.

If the voice that tells these stories is frantic one moment and tender the next, if the stories move freely between past and present and between countries, it is because there is no binding pattern to an immigrant persona. One of the greatest emphases of the book is on the freedom that comes with loss and renewal, retrieval and renunciation. It is not only immigrants in the technical sense that the writer focuses on. Yes, her own story of leaving Romania for the United States, not long after the fall of Communism, is center stage in many of the poems, but there are many other forms of immigration she turns her keen eye to: sometimes it is shaped in the form of a continuous migration toward death and acceptance of it; sometimes it is a lack of belonging, the Gypsy identity of the outcast who struggles to stay afloat in a hostile community; sometimes it is a closer look at the play between appearances and reality, the writer digging deep into the soil of history to find the lies; the terrors that make people flee while searching for something else. This something else does not need to be a redrawing of contours; a different place and different identity. Immigration is not just a negotiation of boundaries but also a disavowal of their confinement. Immigration can mean escaping one’s past to find the present and escaping one’s present to find another way to the past. Moscaliuc’s poetry shows that, if immigration is anything, what it isn’t is a complete breach and a complete eradication, and that many stories can fit in the substance of this word. There is no set “model,” but there is the constant need to find one.

Even the seven parts that make up the collection are not fenced off by clear boundaries. The poems respond to each other just as the speaker’s earlier, Romanian persona who preserves her ties as carefully as her mother makes preserves out of everything, is in continuous communication with her new persona, the American wife and mother who can’t sit still in her surroundings. And this rejection of stillness of any kind means that there will always be ghosts, ghosting and ghostlings, and no loss is final.

As the persona reminisces about the fall of Communism in 1989, when people watched obsessively the diminished, “infuriatingly small,” freshly executed bodies of dictators Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu, the story seems part of a current conversation, not something to be forgotten. It is addressed to a “you” as if still trying to make sense of how and why “we measured and re-measured the corpses, / shot and reshot them…so we replayed the execution all through Christmas.” In the dreamscape of the poems, someone is always running and crossing forbidden borders in search for a sweetness and an idealism that is always doomed to turn rotten, as in “You Ask Why I Buy Pineapples and Let Them Go to Waste”: “The inside had collapsed into a vitreous mess, / or so it seemed with all those bloated bodies trembling / in and out of focus on the mute TV.” The voice of the poems is merciless when indicting the...