Moon Landing Day by Alissa Sammarco

With cinematic imagery, Alissa Sammarco reveals the difficult truths of a young woman’s life, and of the harm that is passed from one generation to the next “with the words they swallow/the words they spit out.” But even as the doomed and self-destructive lovers in these poems inevitably “walk old paths in old shoes” as did their parents before them, the poet is making new paths with the unflinching honesty of her remembering.

–Pauletta Hansel, author of Heartbreak Tree; Cincinnati Poet Laureate Emeritus

In Moon Landing Day, poet Alissa Sammarco navigates trajectories of relationships blasted off course by miscalculation, unmet expectations, abuse, and addiction.  It is a painful journey where forgiveness “comes like black cassocks /that sway in windy prayer.” Where even confessions mask their true shape and size when “they tumble like river rocks/until smooth and round,/lying just below the water.”  The chapbook’s rich music and stark imagery drape the struggle to live a meaningful life in epic clothing. Krakens appear on the horizon, daughters blow kisses from the bluffs, while some poems allude to mythic battles on a dark plain. One poem, “I am the Thin Blue Line” describes addiction as a total loss of control in these words, “As I reached an apex, the rockets exploded,/crashing into the sea./My separation complete.”  Moon Landing Day flickers with the spark of emergent self-knowledge that ultimately burns toward strength.

–Roberta Schultz, Singer, Songwriter, Poet; author of Asking Price.

Alissa Sammarco‘s collection Moon Landing Day is a vibrant exploration of the human experience. We travel from beach cliffs to the Mariana Trench, from LaGuardia to the gates of Hell. In doing so, we gather moments of being a woman, a lover, a griever, a questioner, a spirit meandering over the planet in a complex, physical body. Like the opening lines of “Regrets” that read “I thought I’d gathered them all up / one by one and put them in my pocket,” we will want to gather and keep these poems in our pockets and come back to them again and again.

–Melissa Helton, author of Inertia: A Study and Hewn.

Praise for Moon Landing Day:  In Moon Landing Day, Alissa Sammarco has written a précis in poetry of what occurs when drinking and abuse go on between a couple. There is a yearning for forgetfulness in cocktails, to orbit the very earth riding comets of moonshine, but the poet’s candid voice turns inward to faith in an ironic inversion of Christ’s cry of forsakenness – rather, in the drinker’s case: self-pity – surrounded by a hellscape of dogs straight out of Dante’s Inferno.  She is “shocked by bitterness [where] all the world lost its sweetness.”  Her dearest hope is expressed to this reader at the revealing onset: “take me down deep/ before the black waves / give way to rainbow spray / in tomorrow’s sunrise.” The poet’s voice does not really want to be seen by everyone; it is as if you are her confidant. 

—Manny Grimaldi, Editor of Yearling, Author of i love to say i love you but i don’t know what it means.