alina Ştefănescu

PRESS PAGE FOR MY HERESIES
Sarabande Books, April 29, 2025

What a spellbinding book. (Ilya Kaminsky)

An exceptional collection. . . (Lucas Mancini)

She reminds us that rupture–not rapture–can be the holiest of holies. (Jonathan Cardew)

She is one of the blessed fools, one who always goes over the top. (Chris Waddington)

…this deep-bodied lyrical perfume she has made (Jael Montellano)

Boris, I don't know what sacrilege is. All sins against grandeur of any kind (and there aren't many kinds) are one and the same.
All others — a matter of degree..... That which burns without heat is God.
—- Marina Tsvetaeva in a letter to Boris Pasternak, 22 May 1926

REVIEWS AND MEDIA

“On My Heresies, poems by Alina Stefanescu” by Chris Waddington (On The Seawall)
”…be careful. Stefanescu isn’t faking when, in her book’s afterward, she quotes from Isaiah: “He made my mouth like a sharp sword.”  Straddling several languages, she trumpets her high wild songs in English, and knows why Eudora Welty once praised “the spilled drop, not the saved one.” Stefanescu pours out everything  in this collection, sharing the joys and terrors of sex, of family life, of loss and exile. She tends to her Dionysian craft. She accepts the hangovers. She writes for all of us who need poetry at three a.m. She is one of the blessed fools, one who always goes over the top, one who never forgets Rilke’s dictum: “If drinking is bitter, become the wine.”

“Fashionable Accidents: Contrarianism and Alina Stefanescu’s My Heresies” by Luis Manici (Bruiser Magazine)
”There’s no better place to mention the book’s dimensions, about a hundred pages, 73 (seventy-three!) poems and a handful of epigraphs, no single tone other than intense lyricism and generous erudition that avoids making anyone feel less-literate, and more invention than many books several times its size. . . . While the poems themselves are lacerated and aching, there’s no promise of a redeemed, acheless state and very little concern with progress or healing. Refusal of pat, liberatory narrative invigorates the confessional content, often focused on her and her parents’ expat experience between Ceaușescu’s Romania and Reagan/Trump’s Alabama. No matter where you end up, you won’t be free there, either.”

“We Began in Cosmic Obscenity”: A Review of Alina Stefanescu’s My Heresies by Jonathan Cardew (Bending Genres)
“The irony of time. The irony of language. This book could have been called My Ironies (but My Heresies is much better–more scurrilous, more juicy, more biblical-sounding). And throughout, Stefanescu resists formal containment. Her prose poems bleed into lineated ones, and punctuation fragments. This formal fluidity mimics the experience of dislocation: every sentence a border crossing, every line a step off a cliff.”

“Day for Night with Caridad Svich” (Day for Night podcast)
Playwright and 2024 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow in Drama & Performance Art Caridad Svich read several of Alina’s poems on her podcast, Day for Night. Truly no words encompass the delight of hearing someone else open your poems by performing them.

INTERVIEWS AND FEATURES

“Nothing Less Than Everything: An Interview With Alina Stefanescu” by Jael Montellano (Hypertext)
“Thinking has always been an erotic experience for me. Everything I’ve written was conceived in relation to desire. Although some poems are more explicitly erotic, even the socialization poems emerged from that tension between saying and not-saying that puts a self at risk.”

“Asterisk, Etiologies, & Octave with Line from a Lullaby w/Alina Ștefănescu” (My Bad Poetry)
An episode of the My Bad Poetry podcast from March 25, 2025, where Alina and Dave talk about their bad poetry, and how poems flop about like failed Moby Dicks before finally being abandoned.

Two poems from My Heresies (BOMB)
Published in spring issue of BOMB magazine! Do get a print copy of one the most visually stunning journals in print.

A FEW POEMS FROM MY HERESIES

“The Home Is Six Hens Which Never Lay Eggs” (Five South)
“Mysterium, As Engraved on Pope’s Tiara until the Reformation” (Ballast Journal)
”Poem for the Black Bird” (Poetry)

For a signed copy by the author, please email Alina and be part of a poetry fundraiser for Heal Palestine.

For review copies, please contact Kira at info@sarabandebooks.org.

Planned events and readings can be found on the calendar page. I would be honored to read, speak, explain, think aloud, or do anything involving words, and you can contact me by email.

Purchase My Heresies from the publisher, Sarabande Books, or anywhere, including:

Thank You Books
Open Books: A Poetry Emporium
Ernest & Hadley Books
& Ampersand Books
Barnes and Noble
Bookshop.org

Including poems that were first published by the following in various journals, including:

| 8 Poems | Apofenie | Ballast | Blood Tree Literature | Boats Against the Current | Border Crossings | Brooklyn Rail | Cagibi | Cincinnati Review miCRo | Copihue Poetry | Copper Nickel | Counterclock | Couplet Poetry | Dishsoap Quarterly | Five South | Hoosac Institute | Ilanot Review | Kenyon Review | Leavings | Moist Poetry Journal | New World Writing Quarterly | Poet Lore | Poetry | Salamander | Spoon River Poetry Review |

MUSIC: THE PART WHERE “I GO ON TALKING”

“Only music can create an indestructible complicity between two persons. A passion is perishable, it decays like everything that part takes of life, whereas music is of an essence superior to life and, of course, to death.” 

— Emil Cioran, Anathemas and Admirations

”When you edit audio tape, when you cut it with a single-edge razor blade and splice it back together in a new place, you are shifting reality;  the words, the notes you have excised no longer exist. It is a very private world. You are the only one who knows what happened. The finished product is presented as real. The process is at once craft, art, metaphysics.”

— Noah Adams, Piano Lessons: Music, Love, and True Adventures

“Let this be the epitaph for my heart; Cupid put too much poison in the dart—”

— The Magnetic Fields, “Epitaph for My Heart”

There is always music in the background of things being written, and I’m not sure these poems —- or this human — are recognizable without the sense of some of these songs, for which I am grateful.

my heresies
Epitaph for My Heart / Magnetic Fields           Angels / Joe Henry                     The Slow Drug / PJ Harvey          
Cactus / Pixies                                       A Forest / The Cure                            Heartbreak Beat / The Psychedelic Furs      
Dress Rehearsal Rag / Leonard Cohen            What We All Want / Gang of Four               Padam / Benjamin Biolay     
Glory Box / Portishead Live At Roseland NY              Infra 4 / Max Richter                    Here It Is / Leonard Cohen                   
Ne regrette rien / Benjamin Biolay feat. OrelSan            Black Hearted Love / PJ Harvey and John Parish         Sold / Joe Henry
Untitled / Interpol         Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy in D Minor/ Glenn Gould           Souffrir par toi n'est pas souffrir/ Benjamin Biolay

b-sides
No. 1 Hit Song / The Minutemen Change (In the House of Flies) / Deftones Armor / Tricky (feat. Terra Lopez) Hit the City / Mark Lanegan Band Exsangue / Benjamin Biolay Flesh and Blood / Solomon Burke
Richard Pryor Addresses a Tearful Nation / Joe Henry Sonata for Violin and Piano - 2. Lento / Aaron Copland Etude no. 6 / Philip Glass (piano, Timo Andres) Le Métèque / Georges Moustaki C’est magnifique / Benjamin Biolay

“There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot. For certain engineering purposes, it is desirable to have as silent a situation as possible. Such a room is called an anechoic chamber, its six walls made of special material, a room without echoes. I entered one at Harvard University several years ago and heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation. Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music.”

— John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writing

“I don't know what the Saties did in the Hundred Years War; nor have I any information on their attitude and the part they played in the Thirty Years War (one of our loveliest wars). Let the memory of my ancient ancestors rest in peace. Oh yes ... Let us pass on. I shall come back to this subject later. That is why I acquired a taste for misanthropy; why I nurtured hypochondria; why I became the most (leaden-like) miserable of men. It distressed people to look at me — even through hall-marked gold eye-glasses. Oh yes. And all this happened to me because of Music. That art has done me more harm than good, really: it has made me quarrel with people of quality, most honorable, more-than- distinguished, terribly genteel people. Let us pass on. I shall come back to this subject later.”

— Erik Satie on his family history, in Memoirs of an Amnesiac

NOTEBOOKS

It begins… | En-vois. | Twinkle. Twinkle. | My fear of not pleasing you. | Bolaño on "the best gang." | A five-stem corona for Arnold Schoenberg. | March and April 1914: Kafka's letters. | Farting, breath, and Beckett.

If I know my angels, I know what they’d say — 
See this winged boy falling. Falling out of something —