Marin Sorescu is one of the most powerful and prolific writers in contemporary Romania, but this collection is the first to bring his work to the attention of American readers. Enormously vital, playful, and down-to-earth, Sorescu's poems find an eloquent balance between the exigencies of twentieth-century politics and the edgy exhilaration of twentieth-century imaginative life. Through these translations, as Seamus Heaney says, "American readers now have direct entry into one of the most cheering and distinctive regions of the contemporary poetic imagination."
Marin Sorescu was born in Romania in 1936 and has lived in Bucharest since 1960, working as an editor and the director of Animafilm Studios. In addition to publishing many volumes of poetry, he is also a playwright, essayist, translator, and writer of children's books.
