Memory Glyphs: 3 Prose Poets from Romania

Regarded as abnormal, or a bastard species in Romania, the non-genre of prose poetry has produced some of the most astounding work of European literature, such as Rimbaud's Illuminations, or Baudelaire's Paris Spleen. The present volume - a substantial selection of the work of three contemporary practitioners from separate parts of Romania - is no exception. Cristian Popescu experimented with personal myth by parodying his family and himself. The Bucharest found here is often sinister, cold, and dark. Displaying a mordant sensibility that could be called urban pastoral rather than political, he conducts his convivial disputations with God in the vernacular of the street. Iustin Panta, from Sibiu in Transylvania, is more lyrical and intimate in exploring his personal autobiography. An amalgam of form, his prose poem takes on an aura of suspended meaning, a constellation of objects, gestures, conversations, and private associations that eschews the grotesquerie and solecism found in Popescu's work. Radu Andriescu is from the artistic hotbed of Iasi, straddling the Moldavian border. His work is exuberant, direct, often manic (e.g. his Club 8 Manifesto), and he is completely comfortable appropriating the forms of today's digital and media culture. A complex topography of language, his work ranges from the quotidian to inner meditations to fantasy, creating a texture that is thick with images and phrases often bordering on the absurd.