“At the very opening of Cemetery Ink I hit the phrase ‘the penal colony in our ribcage.’ Or rather, it hit me, and I handed myself over to the wisdom, fearlessness, and verbal verve of this poet. Moscaliuc is a poet in the middle of her journey, but an old soul. ‘May you preserve the wisdom with which you arrive,’ she tells an unborn son, and I sense she has taken pains to do just that herself. In ‘Maggot Therapy’ she borrows the personae of three young women in a Romanian psychiatric hospital. ‘I hold the raddled deck,’ she says in the voice of the fortune teller.  She admires the ‘silky bagworm nest fastened so ingeniously to the apple branch.’  With a novelist's grasp of a social system and a poet's attention to form and flesh, Moscaliuc has filled her poems with life, death, suffering, pleasure, and power.” —Alicia Ostriker, author of The Volcano and After

"Mihaela Moscaliuc’s Cemetery Ink meditates on both human brutality and the grammars of survival.  It is difficult witness, which she does with formal and musical precision, with care and ardor.  This is a poetry made of rigorous wondering, by which I mean struggle, by which I mean, yes, work, that ‘if I do it right/…the splinter / will release the orchard.’ I am so moved by these poems, which are Moscaliuc bringing the orchard to fruit. Or to say it another way: bringing the sorrow into song." —Ross Gay, author of Be Holding