Alina Stefanescu takes every risk — and triumphs — in My Heresies, a trapeze act of lyric expression that never lets readers forget how far one can fall in a world of mortal consequences and joyful abandon. This second full-length collection reveals an artist whose ambitious, intellectually potent verse transcends mere autobiography, while drawing strength from private experience: as a mother of three, as a sexual being and religious seeker, as an immigrant, and as a scholarly autodidact who clings to her Romanian roots in the unlikely setting of Birmingham, Alabama.
Both the risks and ambitions of Stefanescu’s poems come through most clearly in a clutch of lyrics that cite from the Book of Revelation — an act that amounts to throwing herself on the charged, third rail of Western poetics. Her poem, “Revelation 18:24,” begins with a mysterious dedication set in italics: “a golden shovel with gender adjustments — for a shadow on a sidewalk.” Then the poet steps into the whirlwind, armed with internal rhymes, parallel logic, and oratorical repetitions:
And the loose ends
in me could barely look at you flinchless.
It felt like borrowed brightness. Or
was it the rapture’s tightness? My way of being
found is not without pleasure:
the whir of the email opening, the
blood of a bitten lip, the studious dance
of attentiveness … to grasp your intent.
Prophets have meant things forever,
and who can mean blazes so fervently? Which undertone
of text fails to inflame its iterations? Hagiographies need
saints as deeds need kisses, as pews need knees
and kneelings. Should I defy ritual to be new to you? To be
of novel heresy? The snakebite recites its secret:
all harmless skin is worth tasting. Would
that you knew me. Would that you
were some truer thing. Would that the
slain parts of humans greened into vines
upon a brick wall and you could walk
the city’s entirety tonight. Would that the unrelenting
earth wasn’t the book I kept misreading.
Thus Stefanescu claims her mantle. Such gestures cannot be taught: Hers is a revealed vision, a gift of tongues, a consequent nakedness before experience. My Heresies reminds one that the great devotional poets were rarely doctrinaire, that they often embraced themes that would trouble the conventionally pious. Stefanescu sounds like no one else, of course, but will likely inspire readers who value the crabbed density of Robert Lowell’s earliest work, Dylan Thomas at his most incantatory, Walt Whitman’s hymns to the flesh, George Herbert commanding one to “forsake thy cage, / thy rope of sands, / which pettie thoughts have made.” Also, grab Rilke and Celan and put them by the bedside lamp.
In My Heresies, Stefanescu brings everything closer: nipple to lip, face to window, subject to verb. Here’s how it works in “After Reading the Extended Family Hate Mail,” where even the sea’s vastness fits within the compass of a nine-line, domestic poem:
Let’s walk away from the rotting dung-heaps, their diameters
seeking verbs in our mouths, the ice cream truck hollering
the same hollow requiem as wooden flowerbeds hold out
their reds like tulip-pimps in the park of Good Fridays.
Forgive the hatred of blood’s relation. Don’t hold me against
the shallow delights of small mammals with blue balloons,
or the dog running his nose over the arched back of the squirrel’s doom,
those corneas frozen open, my eyes frozen like this in you — everything
is a word for an ocean. An ocean is a puddle if we kneel closer.
Full throated rhetoric doesn’t embarass Stefanescu — and yet, her songs never choke the reader with lapidary baubles. Her lines are mutable, like metal vaporized in a sorcerer’s alembic. Her substance shifts. Her guises are many. An insistently contemporary artist, she possesses what T.S. Eliot praised in an essay on Elizabethan playwright Philip Massinger: “That perpetual slight alteration of language, words perpetually juxtaposed in new and sudden combinations” to produce fresh meanings.
Stefanescu exploits the protean virtues of her adopted tongue — enriching her poems with slang, catch phrases, latinate terms, the professional argot of gamblers and physicians, and a sprinkling of Romanian. The common reader may feel compelled to reach for a dictionary, but such efforts are rewarded with a feast of double meanings and interlingual play. In Viaticum, for example, her title might refer to the Eucharist, a travel allowance, or provisions for a journey. Here all three definitions seem relevant as the narrator of this allusive poem packs her bag with help from her deceased mother, travels across borders, pays foreign officials and gradually comes to understand the nature of her gamble: “One half of me is all-american currency, / the other half would trade anything to keep / moving.”
You can feel her all-American half in many poems from the collection. “We Keep Driving” rolls along with the loose-limbed rhythms of spoken English. “I Nominate the Magnolia as Sexiest Tree” concludes with an immigrant’s wish for a child born in America: “I plant a tiny / magnolia in the middle of my middle/ daughter’s name so none can deny / her placement.”
The American impulse to tinker — and our desire for novelty — comes through in two experimental poems: “An Intense Sense of Victimization” and “Alternative Index Discovered in Franz Kafka’s Notebooks”. Both pieces consist of fragments, and the associative sparks fail to leap from line to line. But these are small distractions in an expansive collection that runs to 110 pages.
If you are a seeker, look for My Heresies. Others should 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.”
[Published by Sarabande Books on April 29, 2025, 100 pages, $17.95 paperback]