Moonscape for a Child
What does it mean to live well and with purpose in a world on fire?
Bored Wolves / Paperback ($18.00) / Number of pages 128 / Publication Spring 2024 / ISBN 9788396844484
Ship to the US + Canada: Point Reyes Books, Powell’s City of Books, various indie bookstores, or this US-based indie distributor
Ship to Europe: Bored Wolves (SOLD OUT)
Ship to the UK: Good Press
Buy a personalized, signed copy: Email stories [at] allierigby.com
From the publisher:
Rigby’s poems expand the possibilities for what it means to remain tethered to a planet on which life may teem even in the absence of rain. Throughout, she imagines and attempts to regain “purpose from a time / when women fed birds / fed all the birds.”
Moonscape for a Child is illustrated by artist Julia Rigby, who worked in blue ink to convey the merging of psyche into landscape, and the domestic everyday into the realm of myth and back again.
What people are saying:
“Reading Moonscape for a Child is a lesson on how to respect silence. The poems speak with compression - but it's the kind of compression that proceeds an explosion.”
—Chavonn Williams Shen, author of Still Life with Rope and River (Finishing Line Press, 2024).
“Every poem presents us with questions about life, its meaning; relationships, how to navigate them; the self, who we are; most importantly how do we expand into all the possibilities of being human. These are poems to cherish and to keep as a reminder of our humanity.”
—Katia Aoun Hage, founder of Elyssar Press and author of After the War the Women Spoke (2023).
“Through Allie Rigby’s eye we see personna as vast as the sun as small as the field mouse, the sea slug, all calling to a reader watching a sun that might, might not, set.”
—Marshall Woodward, author of Clown Star (Gutslut Press, 2022).
“Allie Rigby has conjured a fluid space in Moonscape for a Child, a tender ecosystem of poems bursting with and reveling in amphibian songs, willow fluff, sea stars, thick thoughts, and sticky time. Combined with Julia Rigby's gorgeous blue ink and watercolor drawings, an ancestral land of wonder and shadows comes to life, “a time / when women fed birds, / fed all the birds” and the soft desert floor beckons in guests. With her spectral yet gentle lyricism, Rigby reminds us of the fragility of the quotidian, the ache of expansiveness, and that our “great-greats” long to say to be near us, love on us, and simply say to us, “Hello.”
—Amanda L. Andrei, literary translator, community archivist, and playwright of Lena Passes By (2020).
“Allie Rigby's debut collection reveals a world both devastating and magical: animals are injured, but they can be nursed; eggshells can break a finger, but we have antidepressants.”
—Carroll Beauvais, author of Preverbal (Lit Fox Books, 2025).
