Quantum

Irina Moga’s third poetry collection published by DarkWinter Press (2025), felt to me like I entered the quiet room of a Simon and Garfunkel song. With imagery of coffee and morning light, of tabletops and the contemplations of life and the orientation of bodies around those surfaces, Quantum was immediately nostalgic.

In her poem, “Coffee Cup,” the reader enters a domestic space, a kitchen table with coffee cups in which sharing a morning cup of coffee “has become a ritual of white lies.” I perceived this imagery as a still life water colour, time measured as shifting crystalline afternoon light, as if there was curtain lace stencilling over a “dangling conversation.” I could hear those “superficial sighs,” “the borders of our lives.” But, Moga’s world, the texture is 

“A decay of porcelain/ in thread-like filaments of words/ surfacing between us/ like distant weeping moss,/ in the reflection of two infinity mirrors/ facing each other/ and hung/ on two opposing walls.” 

Nature has crept in and will take over. Moga captures distance and intimacy in tandem. Thus, in that expert crafting, she captures her reader.  

Moga writes down to the quantum level, to the most minute and discrete texture of being. Her poetry bevels down, navigating and capturing within her final lines exchanges and the spaces between measurable steps of relationship. 

And in the grotto of these exchanges and spaces, that is where the reader connects with what cannot typically be grasped or quantified. Through mechanical style and sensorial cues, Quantum brings its reader through the ache of life to a place of humility that soothes pain and gives us something visceral and spiritual in appreciating those blinks between heartbeats. 

Organized into three sections, “Five or Six Islands,” “Quantum,” and “Snow Moon,” there are around 76 poems in total in the collection. Moga meets us in the tone of subtle ledges, a cadence of life’s completion, in the morning light after the ‘long hours of night,’ “like spider webs hanging from a/ discoloured chandelier,” the poet seeks “the warmth of a foothold.” Upon this life ledge, in the ‘afterglow’ of perceiving, we really just are “veins and scant fog.” Also, “we are alone::quiet dead birds inside the raw filament of an/ extinguished brain,/ the boundary of a single nerve./ Call it leaf, if you must.” Moga lifts us up on winds and sets us back down in a grounding of acknowledgement that we are contained by the boundaries of these bodies, a temporary gift to perceive the world around us for a short while.  

In her poem titled, “Quantum,” a metonym to the collection, Moga culls excess in a reduction of space that leaves us suspended. “There is no gravity pull:/ just a series of strung-out mornings, in which we attempt to/ find ourselves,/ on corridors of silence,/ empty rooms cast into strong headwinds.” We know that a life lived without the pull of gravity is not living. Yet, Moga gains traction here, in lifted liminal spaces. “The cutting pain of writing:/ the void in-between keyboard clicks.” The space of intervals, between feeling and thought to the translation of the invisible to text, to the arrangement of words on the page. Quantum is a bridge, a conduit, “the quantum of our actions/ that will unwind/ as an omen.” And in that unwinding, we discover the poetic sediment of our disturbed bodies when the dust settles. 

Irina Moga is a Canadian poet and the author of six poetry collections. A member of The Writers’ Union of Canada, the League of Canadian Poets, the Association of Italian Canadian Writers, the Federation of B.C. Writers, and the Ontario Poetry Society, Moga has developed a distinctive place within contemporary Canadian poetry through work that crosses linguistic and cultural boundaries. Her French-language collection Variations sans palais, published by Éditions L’Harmattan in Paris, received the 2022 Dina Sahyouni International Literary Prize in France, while Sea Glass Circe was selected for an official launch as part of the 2020 Toronto LitUp! and Toronto International Festival of Authors. Her poems, short stories, and reviews have appeared widely in Canada, the United States, and France, including in Canadian Literature, carte blanche, Contemporary Verse 2, PRISM International, New York Quarterly, California Quarterly, Split Rock Review, Lettres Capitales, and Le Pan poétique des muses. Her work has also been nominated for the SFPA Rhysling Award and Best of the Net, and her poetry has been translated into German, Spanish, Korean, and Farsi.

At the centre of Moga’s writing is a liminal relationship between language and experience. Her multilingual practice allows her poetry to move across linguistic palettes while retaining a sharp attention to the textures and cadences of words. A hallmark of her poetry is the fusion of the cerebral and the sensory. Ideas become embodied through image, rhythm, landscape, and the physical apprehension of the world. Moga approaches poetry not simply as an act of expression but as an immersive encounter with shifting realities, creating a space where intellect and sensation continually inform one another to help heal. 

Her most recent collection, Quantum, extends this distinctive practice and has already received international recognition, winning the 2026 International Poetry Prize of the Claudine de Tencin Academy. Across her work, Moga demonstrates how poetry can function both as inquiry and experience, using the possibilities of language to transcend the boundaries between the personal and the material world.

DarkWinter Press has established itself as an independent Ontario publisher drawn to literature that occupies the space between the familiar and the unexpected. Its catalogue encompasses poetry collections, novels, novellas, and short-story collections, with a particular openness to work that bends genre or approaches conventional forms from an unexpected angle. The press’s call for writing ‘with a twist’ is reflected in a catalogue that moves comfortably between literary fiction, dark fiction, magical realism, prose poetry and more experimental forms. The press has made its mark in being intellectually curious yet accessible, often bringing the metaphysical or the overlooked into conversation with everyday experience. In this context, Irina Moga’s, Quantum, accentuates DarkWinter’s catalogue. 

We are left with an “Open Ending” in Quantum. A gentleness sets in and balms the wounds of these mortal existences. Quantum transforms into a poultice compress. “You’ve come around to a more subdued cycle in your life,/ you’ve come/ to meet the end of a simpler story.” And that is what we seek from poetry sometimes, an opportunity for healing and the palpable yearning of a simpler story.  

Thank you to Irina Moga who reached out to me in request for an honest review.