Moonscape for a Child by Allie Rigby

Poems by Allie Rigby
Drawings by Julia Rigby

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In Moonscape for a Child, Allie Rigby recounts personal confrontations with anxiety and despair at the local and collective level: from burning a pot of rice to scanning the Pyrocene’s horizon for wildfires. Ranging from the terrain of Southern California to sojourns and seasons amidst vibrant Arizona desert and the thick forests of central Maine, the poet shapes a collection meeting the question: “How does one live well and with purpose while also navigating the daily reality of depression?”

These poems describe experiences when even proximity to the people and places usually capable of providing solace fails to alleviate the dead weight of despondency. What happens then, when one is unmoored by the flow of a depressive interiority into a frangible external environment? Rigby’s poems expand the possibilities for what it means to remain tethered to a planet on which life may tenaciously teem even in the absence of rain. Throughout, she seeks to regain the “purpose from a time / when women fed birds / fed all the birds.”

Moonscape for a Child is illustrated by artist Julia Rigby, working in ink and blue wash to convey the merging of psyche into observed landscape and the domestic everyday into the realm of myth and back again.

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Listen to Allie Rigby read the poem “Mouse Fear” from Moonscape for a Child.

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2024
Edition of 400
128 pages, paperback, 12×17 cm, color offset, sewn & glued
Printed on Arctic Munken Print Cream 115 and Pure Rough 300
Designed by Pilar Rojo
ISBN 978-83-968444-8-4

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Allie Rigby is a poet, editor, printer, educator, and initiator of literary communities.

Julia Rigby is an experimental sound artist, filmmaker, visual artist, and sculptor.

The two collaborators share sisterhood, roots in Southern California, and an attunement to entanglements among people, landscapes, non-humans, and natural processes.

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Orange Peel

I spoke
one tone
last night

as I do
when sad—
like a dog.

It’s been a lot.
I am fine.

A lamp in dust
still works.

Hard to read
much
this March.

I peel fruit
now
like a lemur

eyes open
for
asteroids.

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Late March

She can hear the coyotes
from her porch—a neighborhood
on fire, we howl

like dogs, God’s dogs,
and somewhere deep
in oak woodland chaparral

they hear us too,
and she prays
they howl back.

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Gretel

Just like that
she is in the forest
tripping on resolve:

find the berries
lose the way
forget the fables

she’s read a dozen
times, misplace the
pocketed crumbs.

Little mice
and their nibbling
ways, the hard knot

in stomach—
a story egg,
an old one.

She blinks wide-eyed
unsure what to do
if this time
it hatches.