Part science fiction, part natural catastrophe narrative, part Midwestern Gothic fairytale, clawing at the grounded moon is a narrative sequence of prose poems that explores a world in which the moon has crashed into the Midwest, and the people left behind must grapple with the meaning of a heavenly body that has come to rest squarely on the bodies of everything they had believed before the event. The new landscape that develops both on and around the moon becomes more and more manic, as the survivors construct new identities that embrace or question the enhanced desperation and grief of their world. The poems included move with music and energy and repetition toward the "red-centered" reality where metaphor has lost meaning, and the people must decide anew what beauty and faith are and will be moving forward. Instead of the history they so relied on in the past, the nameless people can only trust "a beginning a beginning a beginning," and without any certainty of what can or will happen next, they are left wondering "what sharp names" are needed "to invent a new world."