Liminal Spaces of the Sacred and Proface: Alina Stefanescu’s “My Heresies” https://ift.tt/oQrhvlc
Alina Stefanescu’s My Heresies is an entirely new feminist text in its own right. Observant, angry, and questioning, Stefanescu’s poems guide readers through the liminal spaces where the sacred and the profane collide. Simultaneously, these poems boldly examine the knotted issues surrounding identity and womanhood in an America quickly tipping backwards. Direct and darkly humored, My Heresies is a necessary arrival in contemporary poetry.
At times Plath-esque yet 100% original, Stefanescu’s poems blend the surreal and the nearly absurd with the contemporary and the everyday. The poem entitled “Tonight, as You Pace the Garden” is one such example. “I am eating raw violets,” the speaker declares at the poem’s opening. “I am curious about the possessing / in the having-been possessed,” the speaker continues. Striking and gripping, these opening lines establish a bold defiance that ripples through the collection’s entirety. “You say lazy daisy but I am all / languor, I am all lolling,” the speaker declares, offering another burst of feminist defiance. It is the poem’s conclusion that is the true metaphysical clincher, nonetheless: “And the snails? / They possess the steeple — / the snails have a path to the sky.” This final stanza is both prayer and acknowledgement, a metaphysical call to return to simplicity and to nature in order to find understanding and truth.
Of course, most of Stefanescu’s poems are exactly that — a call to find understanding and truth in a chaotic world rife with white supremacy and misogyny. In “On the Emotional Life of Angels,” the speaker observes, “I suspect officials keep us tethered to nowhere / and birthlands. My guard is notoriously hard to understand.” Language, too, is critical to the poem. As it navigates the challenges of being an immigrant, it examines the necessity of maintaining one’s mother tongue in order to preserve one’s identity. The speaker states:
the borders of language, crossing in me has no stable shore. The angels born in eastern europe must be many-tongued polylinguists.
Not capitalizing “eastern europe” and declaring that the “angels born” there “must be many-tongued polylinguists,” reveals the region’s linguistic and even ethnic complexities. In the fourth stanza, that struggle becomes even more evident:
They wear diacritic stains on their foreheads. Maybe I am one. Maybe I am two. Maybe I am a sausage. Maybe I am a stew. Maybe I’m an unreliable.
The image of the “diacritic stains on their foreheads” acts as an allusion to the Mark of the Beast from the Bible’s Book of Revelations. A Plath-like swirling emerges because of the repetition of “Maybe I am.” The ponderings “Maybe I am a sausage. / Maybe I am a stew” also speak to the ethnic identity markers the speaker carries, while “Maybe I’m an unreliable” carries a sense of anxiety. The poem’s most distinctive emotional jarring occurs abruptly, in the penultimate stanza:
Local Left-Behindlings are stocking guns and 3D printers for the apocalyptic festivities. They told our son that the devil who destroys will be romanian.
This single stanza captures not only the wave of paranoia sweeping America, but also the isolationism permeating American politics and policy — an isolationism that has deepened American white supremacy and racism.
“On the Death of the Day of the Bear” is a folkloric gem, and again Stefanescu displays a sharp talent for balancing two cultures within a single poem. The speaker asserts, “I will die on the day of the bear,” an allusion to 2 February, the Day of the Bear, celebrated around Candlemas in Romania. The bear’s behavior on this day is believed to determine forthcoming weather outcomes. In the third stanza, the bear becomes synonymous with the speaker’s mother:
after this first drink, the bear is most dangerous. She is wild, they will say of my mother after she flees the homeland. She has died, they will mutter upon finding
her tattered bear coat, the one she wore over an ocean to prepare for American winters. Thus the groundhog will gain ground, mark its new time in our minds.
Here, an interesting replacement occurs. The image shifts from that of a bear to that of a groundhog. This shift not only represents the act of immigration, but also the act of assimilation. Another distinctive, transformative shift occurs in the final stanza:
And she who died in the shadow of bears will rise in the suburbs, the streetlights, the pines.
The stanza displays fortitude and resilience, as well as adaptation in the face of adversity.
My Heresies is a lush collection, and it firmly establishes Alina Stefanescu as an indispensable voice in contemporary American poetry. These poems are inescapable, taunting, and intimate. They lay bare the undeniable personal and national multiplicities inherent in American society. The speaker of these poems stands in both amazement and cynicism at the world around them, as they fearlessly survey the inner workings of the human condition.
POETRY My Heresies By Alina Stefanescu
Sarabande Books
Published April 29, 2025
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