Angol
What if poetry were a magic act-and reality the illusion it refuses to preserve?
In The Illusionist: Compulsory Acts, Romanian poet Doina Tudorovici enters a world where fathers speak from memory and death, angels wander the streets, ancient heroes grow old, fairy tales lose their heroes, and history becomes entangled with the private wounds of the body.
Nothing here remains safely symbolic. A drowned dog, a paper kite, a village mill, Achilles, Ulysses, Ovid, Ophelia, Raskolnikov, a gray wolf, a hedgehog, and a ghost may all step into the poem-and once inside, they obey no familiar laws.
Darkly comic, surreal, irreverent, and fiercely intelligent, Tudorovici's poetry moves between Eastern European history and intimate memory, folklore and mythology, philosophical unease and the raw absurdity of everyday life. Language itself is repeatedly taken apart, tested, mocked, and forced to perform one more compulsory act.
This landmark selection brings together poems from five volumes spanning more than three decades of the author's work, introducing English-language readers to a singular voice in contemporary Romanian poetry.
Enter the illusionist's theater.
The trick has already begun.
And reality may not survive the final act.
