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.