Description
- Kind: Perfectbound
- Pages: 136
- Language: English
- Date Published: August 2025
- ISBN 978-1-962847-30-8
Praise
Ştefan Manasia’s poems, in Clara Burghelea’s nimble and muscular translations, take the reader to a place of sharp surprises, fragments of narrative lost in a funhouse of twisting pictures. From local love to global uncertainty, Manasia imbues pop-culture, post-postmodern references with all the emotion of strangeness and lovelorn despair. Manasia’s poems descend from Romanian greats, calling out to Ion Mureşan and Ion Stratan, while they rhyme with Tomaž Šalamun and invoke Roberto Bolaño. In Burghelea’s hands, the book obtains a cat-eyed, narrow intensity, a playful taunting, and piercing rhythm. An exceptional work. —Sean Cotter, translator of Solenoid
Ștefan Manasia writes a protean, paradoxical poetry, contradictory like life itself, a synthesis of realism and visionary thinking, erudition and intense emotion, implosion and explosion, cruelty and tenderness. He can persuade his readers of love and paternity, as well as of destruction and horror. He can cite from the great poetry of the past, though the media culture is also present in his writing. His poems are, as Frank O’Hara would say, “meditations in an emergency”.
The poet considers himself part of “the generation of extinction” but this is rather a chance to him. The clear sky arc of meditation spreads across the semantic splinters of his poetry, a kind of silencer, of very special detachment that is a Manasia trademark in the Romanian contemporary poetry. —Mircea Cărtărescu, author of Solenoid and Theodoros
Ștefan Manasia is one of the leading Romanian poets of our time. The title of his new book, A Clear Sky, is both accurate and deceptive. His own clarity of vision is palpable in every poem, but that clarity is often achieved through indirection and irony, and that clear sky is often filled with threatening clouds. “God,” he writes, explaining why he writes, “shows, as expected,/limited imagination./Nature unveils/only its winding paths.” I’m thrilled there is an English translation that captures both the beauty and the complexity of Manasia’s work. —Lloyd Schwartz, poet and Pulitzer Prize-winning critic
Excerpt
LITHIUM (DANSUL ȘEARPELUI)
Săptămînile trecute am descoperit
că izvoarele cu apă potabilă din
vecinătate au chiar apă potabilă.
cînd am coborît cu bidoanele la umplut,
într-unul din ele o jigodie tocmai
își îmbăiase rottweilerul. Așa că
izvorul ăsta-i deja pîngărit, îmi zic.
Celălalt are bazinul de mult ciuruit
încît gorilele de cartier nu-și mai pot
curăța cîinii care tocmai s-au tăvălit
peste pisica terciuită de tir sau
(văd într-una din zile cu ochii mei)
peste cîrtița zdrobită de coasa
electrică. E un izvor lîngă
bloc, sub grădinile cu zmeură și
căpșune, ceapă, salată. E un izvor
pe care nu l-a revendicat
încă nimeni. Și asta, pe lîngă
cuburile de gheață-n paharul
cu Absolut, mi se pare cel mai
important. Mai important decît
rahaturile despre poezie
debitate în jurul mesei
de bieții ratoni hămesiți.
Îți scriu de la Inso, mîna-mi alunecă
spre gaterul scăpat de sub
Control.
LITHIUM (THE DANCE OF THE SNAKE)
In the past weeks I have discovered
that the potable water springs
in the neighborhood really have drinkable water.
When I went down to fill the bottles,
in one of them, a jerk
had bathed his Rottweiler. So,
I tell myself, this spring is already defiled.
The other has long had its tank pierced
so the neighborhood gorillas can no longer
clean their dogs that have just rolled over
the cat smashed by the truck or
(and I see this myself one of these days)
over the mole crushed
by the lawn mower. There is a spring
near the block of flats
under the raspberry, strawberry, onion and
lettuce gardens. This is a spring
nobody has claimed
yet. And this, alongside
the ice cubes in the Absolut vodka
shot, is the most important thing to me.
More important than all the poetry nonsense
jabbered around table
by the poor famished raccoons.
I am writing to you from Inso, my hand slipping
toward the uncontainable
sawmill.
Author
Ştefan Manasia is a Romanian poet, journalist and editor. He published seven volumes of poetry and had his poems translated in Hungarian, French, German, Polish and Modern Hebrew. He is the author of a collection of essays and literary chronicles called The Aroma Stabilizer and a short story collection, The Chronovisor. His most recent poetry collection is The Obscure Sources (2024).
Translator
Clara Burghelea published two poetry collections: The Flavor of the Other (Dos Madres Press 2020) and Praise the Unburied (Chaffinch Press 2021). Her poems and translations appeared in Gulf Coast, Delos, The Los Angeles Review and elsewhere. She is the Review Editor of Ezra, An Online Journal of Translation and the Translation Editor of Reunion: The Dallas Review.
