Adam M Sorkin

“Cârneci’s poetry is a carnival of sensory images, strong emotion and brilliant intellect. It is nevertheless moving, vibrantly accessible and necessary reading for anyone interested in contemporary writing in the whole southeastern European region today. Its conscious fusion of Western and Eastern ...

Mariana Marin’s politically charged poems are here translated by Adam Sorkin, a well-known specialist in twentieth-century Romanian literature. Marin was the poet maudit of her generation and a prominent member of Bucharest literary society. Her poems, rich with metaphoric language and symbolism, ar...

Mihail Galatanu is one of Romania’s most exciting contemporary poets. His verbal brilliance has been described as prodigious, explosive, exuberant, risky: the “Vesuvius” of post-communist poets, one critic enthused. Another praised his natural stylistic gifts by echoing a term that the great Nichita...

Daniela Crasnaru is one of the most prominent poets and short story writers in her native Romania. Once a vocal foe of the Ceauçescu regime, Crasnaru was influenced by the political repression of the communist period; but her short stories depart from those of the many Eastern European writers who u...

Some of the most groundbreaking works of European literature, such as Rimbaud's Illuminations and Baudelaire's Paris Spleen, have been prose poetry. The present volume -- a substantial selection from three contemporary Romanian prose poets -- draws on this tradition. Cristian Popescu experimented wi...

From poet Tess Gallagher, one of the translators of this new book by Liliana Ursu: 'Like a ring of fire around fire,' Liliana Ursu ends her poem, an image that also conveys the intensity of this book. Translating these amazing poems was like translating lightning. They left me singed and stricken bu...

The first comprehensive anthology in English of one of Romania's most important and exciting young poets. With some nine volumes of poetry, five books of fiction, and a number of selected essays published in Romania and Europe, Andrei Codrescu in his introduction makes it clear: Ruxandra is the real...

Luminita Mihai Cioaba, the daughter of the Romanian King of the Gypsy (Roma) nation is both a poet and a prose writer. Her book, The Lost Country, is a volume of traditional stories more or less as told to her by her grandmother, as she has described it; but clearly they are elaborated and filled in...