Father Dirt

Moscaliuc's first collection is hard to forget, though its best passages work more like fragments from memoirs than like poems: most of them portray the travails and traditions, the horrifying conditions and small victories, of life in Romania, where Moscaliuc grew up, in the reign of the tyrant Ceausescu (overthrown in 1989) and in the years of deprivation and chaos that have followed. “At ten we each had at least one/ alcoholic parent... anyone could be the informer”; the state's grotesque pronatalist policies (abortion banned, all fertile women spied on, any pregnancy rewarded) led to the suicides of pregnant teens. The same policies helped to fill the state's infamous orphanages; young men and women grew up there, then lived on the streets. In “Visit Home,” set in 2007, homeless kids sniff paint and live under manholes, while “Chicken bones beckon neighborhood strays.” Moscaliuc (who now teaches in New Jersey) can overshoot her mark or grow melodramatic even in her best lines: an orphan she knew, dead at 27, “packed his wings and a silver spoon and returned to the streets.” Yet her powers of observation and image remain impossible to deny. (Sept.)