Crusader
Woman by Romanian poet Ruxandra Cesereanu. Translated by the poet and Adam
Sorkin with an introduction by Andrei Codrescu. Author of many books in Romania/Europe
we are delighted to present this anthology of new and selected poems. 124 pages.
$18.95
Ruxandra Cesereanu has firmly established herself as one of the most important and exciting Romanian writers of today. Born in 1963 in the city of Cluj-Napoca, the traditional cultural center located at the heart of the region of Transylvania, Cesereanu began publishing poetry in literary reviews in 1981, but her first novel, Voyage through the Looking-Glasses, came out only in 1989, the year Romanian communism was overthrown. She has published nine books of poetry, five books of fiction, and significant essays on the Romanian gulag and political torture. She lives and works in Cluj, where she is an editor at the cultural magazine Steaua (“The Star”) and Professor at the Faculty of Letters (Department of Comparative Literature) at the Babeº-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca. Cesereanu’s collections of poetry include Garden of Delights, Live Zone, Fall Over the City (which won the Poetry Prize of the Cluj Writers’ Association), Schizoidian Ocean, Crusader-Woman, Venice with Violet Veins, Letter of a Courtesan, Kore-Persephone (which also won the Cluj Writers’ Association Poetry Prize), and Lunacies. Her prose works include Tricephalos, Nebulon, and Birth of Liquid Desires. She recently published The Forgiven Submarine, a book of poetry, written collaboratively with Andrei Codrescu which will be published in English in 2009.
“Ruxandra Cesereanu’s Crusader-Woman is a masterful, raucous,
mystical, anguished story poem, arising from the old Romanian churches
of Cluj, with all their stones and thorns and blood. Thence transpires
a female-ish, medieval-ish Crusade. The translation is excellent, and
the poetry true.”
—Alice Notley
“She is a fierce dream visionary for whom only the transmutations
of flesh to words to nature can save us from entropy and obsolescence.”
—Andrei Codrescu, from his introduction
ISBN: 978-0-9795137-5-6