“Moscaliuc’s first collection is hard to forget…her powers of observation and image remain impossible to deny.”
― Publisher’s Weekly

“In Mihaela Moscaliuc’s debut collection, the émigré poet collects totems from her receding past—nettle tea, pinworms, a saddlebag of ghosts, a grandmother translating the cry of a raptor—even as she begins a family in the new world. Father Dirt is steeped in the urgency of a woman still possessed by the pungent memories of the ancestral world she left behind. An outstandingly beautiful collection.”
—Kimiko Hahn

“Mihaela Moscaliuc transfers the weight of one world into the language of another through a series of visceral poetic meditations. The questions born of the blood, quince, and sweet-cherry tastes of her Romanian childhood flow into mature, terse, and sinuous English, to become not answers, but poems that pose new and hard questions. The music of the verse is American, but the contents are forged in the common sorrows of women trapped by an unfortunate history.”
—Andrei Codrescu

“With exquisite lyricism Mihaela Moscaliuc recreates her childhood in Ceausescu's Romania. The narrative of hardship and loss is arresting and poignant but it's the flavors and smells, the rich evocation of folk medicines, the vivid descriptions of potions, ghosts, and ways to ward off demons that raise this first book to impressive heights.”
—Maxine Kumin