Review: At Home Anywhere (A Review Of Alina Stefanescu's My Heresies)

By Hugh Blanton

 

Alina Stefanescu's new book is a straddling of two worlds, a personal history alternating between Romania and Birmingham, Alabama. Her rhetorical force is brilliant, though irritatingly so, and if we want to enter her worlds we have to do it on her terms which at times demand a measure of punishment on the reader. She has a Merwinesque love for trees, a near fanatical infatuation with the book of Revelation, and even her non-religious poems have tinges of religion around the edges. Stefanescu does not, however, wallow as deeply in gloom as fellow Catholic Gerard Manley Hopkins, and she could show him a thing or two about moving effortlessly between the sacred and the profane. There's a lot of name dropping in My Heresies, and while I kept waiting for Czeslaw Milosz's to come up, it never did.

 

For exiles, poetry is a sort of surrogate home and Stefanescu makes full use of it—there's free verse, quasi-sonnets, prose poems, even a poem in the form of an index of Kafka's diary. Her style ranges from impenetrableness so thick it's like walking through a Brillo pad to vividly clear images on the page that appeal to multiple senses:

 

     the fake aroma

 

     of fresh laundry crawls in

     through our windows

     then stumbles out drunk

     from neighboring dryers

                                                                    to stroll the streets.

 

Stefanescu experiments with form and spacing, there are even a couple of karaoke duets in here, and she delights in chasing the reader to a dictionary (though she doesn't have any words out of place as is common with most thesaurus abusers).

 

Stefanescu's parents left Romania during the Ceausescu reign, at first leaving her behind. We don't get a clear explanation why they didn't take her along neither here in this collection nor in any of the interviews she's given, although she dances around it quite often. There's a poem titled "My Father Explains Why They Left Me Behind When Defecting" but all we get is this: "Your eyes didn't match./ One was yellower./ And no leaves on the lindens then/ we didn't know if we'd see you again." The vagueness here is not typical of the rest of the poems, so it's safe to assume she's being deliberately vague and there's nothing under the surface of this poem except more surface.

 

Stefanescu can at times be difficult, some of her poems are as impenetrable as Geoffrey Hill's later work. Here she seems to be taking a page from Hart Crane's brand of modernism:

 

        No stallion, no salve, no savior,

     I tell the cloud near my foot

                                        on the sidewalk

                   before burying forked tongues in the hair

                          beneath my hoodie

                             to race shadows with children.

 

She's at her best when combining rhyme with image: "That birdbath/ sprawled on its side has/ forsaken its purpose -// it has given the snails a steeple/ that is churchless." That's a rhyme that could get by any border sentry, but she sometimes trips up and sets off the alarm: "Maybe I am one. Maybe I am two. Maybe I am a sausage./ Maybe I am a stew."

 

Her prose poem "Filming the Sky" is about a dictator giving a platitudinous speech and a restless crowd beginning to boo while the authorities tell the cameramen to get their cameras off the dictator's bewildered face and point them skyward. She doesn't mention the dictator's name or the country he's in, but anyone's who's seen the videos of it that are now available on the internet will recognize Ceausescu's final speech in Bucharest. (He and his wife Elena would be shot just days later.) For all her mention of Romania (she almost always spell it with a lower case 'r') she isn't clamoring for identity as an expat or a refugee. Stefanescu says her life was changed by Romanian novelist Mihail Sebastian who wrote about what life was like as a Jew in Romania during the WW II years. He was Jewish, he was Romanian, and he would not choose one over the other. Stefanescu doesn't pick a side either, though it does seem as if she and her poems try to negotiate a treaty between Romania and Birmingham. It's an odd quirk of fate that her hero Sebastian was killed in 1945 when he was accidentally hit by a truck in Bucharest—Stefanescu herself was nearly killed when she was hit by a truck when she was fifteen years old.

 

Stefanescu ably inhabits esoteric religious texts, she even titles one of her poems after the writing on Joan of Arc's execution cap, "heretic / relapse / apostate / idolator". She fearlessly adds her own embellishments from time to time, in her poem "Evil Eye", recounting Satan's being cast out of heaven, she refers to Satan as a she. Her poem "Mysterium, as Engraved on Pope's Tiara Until the Reformation" is actually about bar bathroom sex (up until the reformation the Mysterium on the Pope's tiara was said to make up the number 666). The My Heresies cover art is a tongue wearing a golden ring, perhaps an allusion to St. Catherine who claimed Jesus gave her his foreskin as their wedding ring which she put on her tongue, or possibly the Sardinian nun who bound her tongue with a ring before hanging herself. Both make appearances here, although the Sardinian nun is not named (possibly Edvige Carboni).

 

Stefanescu is a lauded writer—her previous collection of poetry, Dor, won the Wandering Aengus Book Award in 2021, and her 2018 collection of fiction, Every Mask I Tried On received the Brighthorse prize. She's one of those perennial revisers; she said after Dor was published she hated it, so it's likely if we see any poems from My Heresies in future collections or anthologies they'll appear in different form. She's usually hitting on all cylinders in her metaphor and simile, though she sometimes just phones it in: "I feel something/ has passed, something has/ shifted in the darkness/ like loose dentures." When she lets her playful side takeover she's a delight: "Dead verbs lather my scalp/ like a church who must service/ the male host first." John Ashbery would definitely approve of that (she even titles one of her poems after Ashbery). Poets can be tiresome when they describe themselves, Stefanescu's self-description is a welcome change: "I am a know-it-all book nerd who acts certain about all the outrageous horseshit galloping out of her horsetooth mouth."

Hugh Blanton's latest book is Kentucky Outlaw. He can be reached on X @HughBlanton5