Category Archives: Nature Notebook

This summer, I was interviewed about my chapbook Water Street by New England Public Radio’s Karen Brown for her summer literary series.

Summer Fiction: ‘Water Street’ by Naila Moreira

“Naila Moreira is a science and environmental journalist who also writes poems. Her new book of poetry, “Water Street,” is immersed in the natural world. She wrote it while living alone in a farmhouse apartment on the Mill River in Leeds, Massachusetts.”

A poem from my forthcoming chapbook, Water Street. It also appeared in the Naugatuck River Review.

For the frogs – love their pale little alien selves. Just the poem this time for easier reading. Published in the Naugatuck River Review issue 16. #poem #poetry #animalpoems #naila_fin

A photo posted by Naila Moreira (@naila_fin) on Nov 27, 2016 at 8:44pm PST

I have a new chapbook of poems coming out from Finishing Line Press. Very exciting!

The collection is called Water Street and explores the tension between freedom and domesticity. I spoke more about the book in this interview.

Of the book, poet Doug Anderson, author of The Moon Reflected Fire, Horse Medicine and other books, said

Naila Moreira is a natural born pantheist. Her day job is writing articles on sustainability of the environment and her poetry is reflexively in love with the earth. The health and sickness of our souls is held tenderly in this lover’s touch. There is no digging out of meaning: it is there if we are able to see it: our “high journeys” will take us “Pole to pole, senseless and invincible, great arcs, like the travelings of the stars.” A fine book with more love than pain and pain held lovingly.

The collection will be out in March, and you can preorder it by clicking here or on the cover image above.

A few sample poems: Frogs, Tractatus, and Lines from Base Camp. The beautiful cover image is by photographer Stephen Petegorsky.

Update: Poet Deborah Gorlin also has graciously given a thoughtful review:

In these urgently engaged poems, the natural world serves as witness and accomplice, muse and mirror, companion and liberator. Hearth and home chafe against wildness, habitats of freedom and promise and untrammeled exploration. Domesticity and desire duke it out in the poet’s quest for profound experiences nothing short of cosmic. By the end of the book, the drama calms, and opposites reconcile, as the poet puts her faith in the instinctive wisdom, mystery and contradictions of the heart, “a dark water that shines.”