Always in Refusal, Alina Ștefănescu’s “My Heresies” Is a Remarkable Collection

"A partisan of erotic absolutism, reticent megalomaniac even among the divers, at the same time messenger of the halo."

— Paul Celan, in the first prose poem he signed as Paul Celan

To continue to speak long after catastrophe is to risk language becoming its own kind of heresy. Paul Celan knew this. His late prose fragment, equal parts confession and evasion, offers a self-portrait that is also a poetics of erotic absolutism, of reticent excess. Alina Ștefănescu’s My Heresies lives in this Celanian lineage, and like Celan (and perhaps like Derrida, her influence, as well), she does not believe in the sanctity of language—only in its residue.

Ștefănescu’s collection is not one of witness, or at least not in the way witness has come to mean testimony. Rather, this is poetry as aftermath, as what happens to a sentence when the structures that made meaning possible have fallen away. Born in Romania under the ash cloud of Ceaușescu’s regime and raised in Alabama after her parents defected, Ștefănescu belongs to a lineage of interruption. Her speaker is perhaps as separated from homeland as from intelligibility itself. The poems share an epistemological breakage of dislocation: Orthodox cosmology snapped in half and scattered across Baptist pews; Balkan folklore lost in the fluorescence of American bureaucracy; silence as a presence of absence, the density of what cannot be said when no one around you shares your referents.

But to reduce this collection to an immigrant narrative is to miss its formal cunning. If My Heresies is political—and it is, with one anti-Trump poem, as Lucas Mancini of Bruiser Mag points out—it is not because it maps Romania against America, but because it stages their irreconcilability as a formal tension inside the line. The tension is linguistic first, national second. In “My Father Explains Why They Left Me Behind When Defecting,” the poem operates as ritualized irresolution. The father’s voice, half-quoted, half-echoed, appears first in linear time—“We didn’t know if we’d see you again.” But from that point on, the poem inverts itself. The sequence begins again, but backward, folding in on itself until it ends in fragment:


“You are the same to me.

The baby in the photo you were, dark

curls we kissed before fleeing

curls we kissed before fleeing.

The baby in the photo you were, dark

you are. The same to me.”

This inversion is structurally indebted to Hoa Nguyen’s “Unrelated Future Tense” form, which reorders a poem’s latter half in retrograde—a technique that, here, mimics both the repetition compulsion of trauma and the grammatical dysphoria of displacement. To defect is to move forward without resolution; to be left behind is to speak only in backwards time. 

That splintering often takes linguistic form: suffixes collapse, metaphors cannibalize themselves, syntax is held together by ash and parentheses. “Extraordinary Premises,” for instance, folds semantic registers into one another until the page becomes a kind of theological word problem. “The extraordinary premises / the ordinary,” she writes, collapsing noun and verb. The sentence is a Möbius strip, and the poem itself resists conclusion, thus resisting the ordinary, as well. 

There's this kind of recurring resistance, a kind of refusal in My Heresies, which is perhaps what's most heretical about it. Ștefănescu has written elsewhere about the dangers of the American trauma-industrial complex—the way immigrant narratives are expected to arrive prepackaged with a moral arc, a grateful citizen, a final line of hope. But this book is smarter than that. It knows that sometimes the wound—in all its resistance—is the most honest thing left. The book’s wound makes room for Kafka and the sexiest trees (the magnolias, of course), for the Book of Revelation and for Ceaușescu’s regime. In “In Case Sanda Ungureanu Comes Over,” a poem that touches on Orthodox ritual and feminine mourning, the speaker describes women smudging soot on their foreheads, knowing one another by ash prints—a gesture that echoes Ash Wednesday but also the coded language of survivors. “We of the dangerous silence,” she writes, and one cannot help but think of all the women raised under authoritarian regimes who learned how to speak in subtext.

What this collection demonstrates, over and over, is that the legacy of Eastern Bloc ideology is also a syntactic one. Fleeing Ceaușescu’s regime implies fleeing the logic of cause and effect that the regime imposed: punishment follows guilt, loyalty follows fear, truth follows order. In My Heresies, none of these pairings hold. The poems are filled with the language of bureaucracy—reports, mail, titles, nominations—but each time, that language fails to deliver what it promises. In “I Nominate the Linden to Continue Its Service As Tree of Longing & Aromatic Futility,” the mock-official tone collapses into absurdity, and more specifically, it collapses the national poetics of Romanian nature (the linden as a Mihai Eminescu symbol) into the absurd. The linden no longer symbolizes beauty or nostalgia; it’s an “aromatic futility,” a thing whose scent has outlived its purpose.

There’s perhaps an argument that Ștefănescu is overambitious, that she does too much with this collection, but I think it’s easily counterbalanced by the fact that this excess is what makes the collection so distinctively beautiful. It doesn’t worry about coherence, nor does it try to be relatable. It risks melodrama, leans into excess, lets itself be ugly. In this way, it shares a certain lineage with poets like Anne Carson or Lara Glenum—women who refuse the feminine as neatly contained lyric and instead explode the form from within.

But unlike Carson, whose erudition often feels airless, or Glenum, whose excess is theatrical, Ștefănescu's work remains unmistakably lived. You feel the girl who stood in a Birmingham school lunchroom, leaving linden for kudzu. You feel the daughter whose father left her in Romania. You feel the mother who now watches her own children howl in ghost costumes on the front yard, on the American pastoral. 

And if America wants the immigrant to be grateful, to have a moral arc, if there’s an insistence on language as sacred, not citational, then Ștefănescu has written a love letter to refusal. She is not grateful. She is not redeemed. And she is not done.

And thank God for that.


Rishi Janakiraman is a poet and essayist who writes from Raleigh, NC. He has been recognized by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, Urban Word, Young Poets Network, Bow Seat, and Best of SNO. A Top 15 Foyle Young Poet of the Year, his work has been published in The New York Times, The Poetry Society, Rust + Moth, and Dishsoap Quarterly, among others. He serves as the Co-Editor-In-Chief of Polyphony Lit and as the NC Youth Poet Laureate. 

Rishi Janakiraman

Rishi Janakiraman is a poet and essayist who writes from Raleigh, NC. He has been recognized by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, Urban Word, Young Poets Network, Bow Seat, and Best of SNO. A Top 15 Foyle Young Poet of the Year, his work has been published in The New York Times, The Poetry Society, Rust + Moth, and Dishsoap Quarterly, among others. He serves as the Co-Editor-In-Chief of Polyphony Lit and as the NC Youth Poet Laureate. 

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