Available 4/29/2025
978-1-956046-37-3 (print)
978-1-956046-38-0 (ebook)
110 pages
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 |
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)
“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
“Riven by the tension between hagiographies, utopias, belief, longing, and grief, the poems of My Heresies catalog a personal and familial history originating in Bucharest, Romania and landing in Birmingham, Alabama. Whether through sardonic takes on old Bible myths or homage paid to French-Romanian poet Paul Celan, Stefanescu’s poems are laden in subtext, in imagery sometimes abstract and lush, at other times stark and shocking. My Heresies probes the boundaries between the sacred and the profane, and the result is a hauntological mapping of life, love, family, and womanhood.”
— Sarabande Books
“The lyrical sweep and abandon of these poems is stunning. The tonal variation here, too, is so special. This is a poet who can be direct, metaphysical, compelling, humorous, intimate, playful—the list goes on. Truly, here is enough fire in these pages for seven poets. What a spellbinding book.”
—Ilya Kaminsky
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 with requests at myheresies at gmail dot com.
Pre-order or purchase My Heresies from the publisher, Sarabande Books, or anywhere, including:
Thank You Books
Open Books: A Poetry Emporium
Barnes and Noble
Bookshop.org
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama with her partner and several intense mammals. Recent books include a creative nonfiction chapbook, Ribald (Bull City Press Inch Series, Nov. 2020) and Dor, which won the Wandering Aengus Press Prize (September, 2021). Her debut fiction collection, Every Mask I Tried On, won the Brighthorse Books Prize (April 2018). Alina's poems, essays, and fiction can be found in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, World Literature Today, Pleiades, Poetry, BOMB, Crab Creek Review, and others. She serves as editor, reviewer, and critic for various journals and is currently working on a novel-like creature. She would be elated if you pre-ordered My Heresies, a poetry collection forthcoming Sarabande in late April 2025. More here.
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. Hence, a collage of lyrics that is also a playlist.
If I know my angels, I know what they’d say . . . See this winged boy falling. Falling out of something. Its the drug I'm needing. The fever in my brain is leaving smoke behind my eyes. Exsangue, I’d like to take you to a place I know, my black-hearted . . . The ghost arrives at his bitter end. To the promised land then the dog descends. Crescendo motto. Bloody your hands on a cactus tree, wipe it on your dress, and send it to me. I loved your face, I loved your hair. I don't trust the God you trust, but here you are hurried. And here you are gone. And here is the love it's all built upon. Si, souvent, j'ai broyé du noir, du gris, du magenta, du marc, de l'eau-de-vie. Communément on le recense sous le nom de l’amour. Communément on le ressent mieux la nuit que le jour. I’m so tired of playing, playing with this bow and arrow. On the back of a winged horse. Through the sky of pearly grey. Love is leaf-like! You and me, baby. Oh la la la, c’est manifique. Yes, and here, right here, between the peanuts and the cage, between the darkness and the stage, between the hour and the age. Down on my knees and my hands in the air again. And the world don't stop every time that you fall. . . . It may not last forever but, oh, when its flowing … running towards nothing again and again and again and again... the part of me that wants to fly. Mais nous ferons de chaque jour toute une éternité d'amour que nous vivrons à en/avant mourir.
“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
RELATEDLY
“Asterisk, Etiologies, & Octave with Line from a Lullaby (w/Alina Ștefănescu)”
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
Published in spring issue of BOMB magazine! Do get a print copy of one the most visually stunning journals in print.
