Abandon

January 2005
78 pages | ISBN 978-1-894987-05-9

A strong debut collection from Montreal poet Oana Avasilichioaei, Abandon is filled with the richness of a country’s history. The poet melds the legends of Romania with its new reality in her vivid and insightful poetry. Dragons rub shoulders with Mountaineers with bad teeth. Women wash carpets in the river, and builders wall women into Monasteries. This is a rich collection and a very promising new voice in Canadian poetry.

Reviews

Abandon (Jennifer Boire, Prairie Fire Magazine, 7/6/2007).
"Avasilichioaei is no tourist and writes without sentimentality of present-day Romania. She has captured the physical and economic gloom in a voice that is part documentary voice-over, part visionary."

Book Reviews: Poetry (Anita Lahey, Malahat Review, 4/1/2007).
"... promises a trip well beyond the familiar Canadian lyric into a hard reality, a subversive, myth-like poetry swirling masterfully about its secrets and clues."

Abandon (Kris Brandhagen, PoetryReviews.ca, 4/5/2006).
"Avasilichioaei's free verse sees the old ways with new eyes and listens to language with unaccustomed ears."

Excerpt

"Self-portrait"

Rubble wounds this valley in a slow funeral song
an owl drowns in a water barrel
and I see your face
white, almost transparent
pasted on a newspaper.
The paper, clipped
with clothes pegs on a string at a news stand,
flaps in the wind.

I think you must be looking at me.

I try to avoid your gaze, turn
my eyes to the hands of a child
playing on the shattered sidewalk –
paralysed toys, stale air.
But the face
my face blowing
in the wind, paper-thin . . .

I am feverish and too alive.

About the Author

Oana Avasilichioaei is a poet and translator whose work explores history, geography, public space, textual architecture, multilingualism, translation, textual and collaborative performance, and who transformed the landscape of Vancouver’s Hastings Park into an acclaimed book of poems, feria: a poempark (Wolsak & Wynn, 2008). She has translated Nichita Stanescu from Romanian, published as Occupational Sickness (BuschekBooks, 2006), created visual textworks for galleries in Montreal and Vancouver, and has performed her work in Canada, USA, Mexico and Europe. She recently collaborated with Erín Moure on Expeditions of a Chimæra (BookThug, 2009), a dialogic work exploring the boundaries between author/translator and original/copy. The Islands, a translation of Les Îles by Quebecoise poet Louise Cotnoir, is forthcoming from Wolsak and Wynn in 2011 and We, Beasts, Avasilichioaei's newest poetry collection, in 2012.

Other Titles by Oana Avasilichioaei

We, Beasts (2012)

The Islands (2011)

feria: a poempark (2008)