Poet Lore and The Writer’s Center present a FREE virtual chat about the craft of poetry! We’re joined by Alina Stefanescu to discuss her new poetry collection, dor. Alina is in conversation with Emily Holland, poet and Editor of Poet Lore, America’s oldest poetry magazinel.
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We encourage you to order a copy of the book from your local, independent bookseller or online through the publisher.
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). Her poetry collection, dor, won the Wandering Aengus Press Prize (September 2021). Alina’s writing can be found (or is forthcoming) in diverse journals, including Prairie Schooner, North American Review, World Literature Today, Pleiades, FLOCK, Southern Humanities Review, Crab Creek Review, and others. She writes a little bit of everything. More online at alinastefanescuwriter.com.
About the Book
Winner of the 2021 Wandering Aengus Book Award!
“Alina Stefanescu’s DOR is a compendium of desire, displacement, longing, and belonging. While the word ‘dor’ itself ‘serves as a bridge which creates its own territory from fusion,’ here Stefanescu’s words do their own act of bridging the spaces between the body and language. In these poems, tongues, like nations, have borders; nouns and verbs come alive with ownership and agency. Stefanescu writes ‘a good girl poem waits // for the bass.’ but these are not good girl poems. Part genealogy of influences, part meditation on love, lust, and loss, and part pointed feminist critique, DOR is a multi-faceted collection that creates a newly textured landscape of language.” —Emily Holland, author of Lineage and editor of Poet Lore
“‘You must write a self/ out of waiting/ to speak’ asserts Alina Stefanescu’s Dor and oh, what a prismatic, many-headed self has been written into existence within these pages. In her stunning second full-length collection, Stefanescu explores the worlds contained in the Romanian word Dor— a word close to longing but with no exact English equivalent—as it relates to the speaker’s life as a daughter, a mother, a foreign body in a country that harms and holds us conditionally. Simultaneously tender and incisive, witty and full transformations, this book and its many ecosystems of longing and belonging begs to be re-read and promises new wonders each time.” —Jihyun Yun