feria: a poempark

September 2008
104 pages | ISBN 978-1-894987-29-5

Oana Avasilichioaei deftly dismantles language and landscape in a whirling collection of poetry. feria is a poetic frolic in Vancouver's Hastings Park eluding boundaries of landscape, time and narrative. Avasilichioaei writes and rewrites over this image, interpreting its evolving layers. Park and book coincide, and the author finds herself asking what is natural, what is language, and whose voices are we listening to. This is a book that pulls the reader into a wild ride, leaving you breathless but exhilarated by the end. Watch her YouTube video here.

Reviews

Writing the new (Vancouver) Geography (rob mclennan, Maple Tree Literary Supplement, 03/17/2011)
“Working from various sources including archival material, Avasilichioaei writes an engagement with parks in general, and Vancouver’s Hastings Park specifically... feria: a poempark is far and away a stronger and more compelling collection than Avasilichioaei’s first, and I am amazed by it. How can I ever see parks the same?”

Review (Gregory Betts, Journal of Canadian Poetry Vol. 25, 2/1/2011)
“It is in the distortion of the record that her metaphysical musings about the nature of the poempark, the intersection of language and environment,—or perhaps, language as environment—find their surest expression.”

Review (Michael Roberson, Arc, 12/1/2009)
“Rather than simply relying on comparison in her most recent book feria: a poempark, Oana Avasilichioaei pushed beyond simile and metaphor–a poem is (like) a park–creating a third place privileging neither nature nor culture.”

Review (Karis Shearer, matrixmagazine, 11/27/2009)
“Oana Avasilichioaei’s second collection of poems, feria: a poempark, is a sophisticated exploration of history, geography, language, and textuality in the phenomenological or proprioceptive tradition of Robert Kroetsch’s The Ledger and Daphne Marlatt and Robert Minden’s Steveston.”

Review (John Holbert Cunningham, Prairie Fire Magazine, 10/20/2009)
“This is a book of humorous surprises that befuddle the mind of the reviewer.”

Review (M. Travis Lane, Fiddlehead, 4/1/2009)
"With the more recent influx of European immigrants, Avasilichioaei's style becomes more coherent, more anecdotal, and moderates into the language of a child's recollections and imaginings. She reminds us that place, wherever it is, is the effect in nature of imagination.”

Highlights (BC Bookworld, 3/1/2009)
“A is for Avasilichioaei. When not translating the Romanian poetry of Nobel Prize winner Nichita Stanescu or French literarure, Oana Avasilichioaei... has used Vancouver’s Hastings Park (PNE grounds) as her focus for feria: a poempark.”

Review (Small Press Bookwatch, 2/1/2009)
“Layers are the topic, and Oana weaves it well.”

West Coast settings power new poetry from Tim Bowling and Oana Avasilichioaei (Barbara Carey, Toronto Star, 2/8/2009)
“Feria is an intriguing project, sometimes difficult to get a fix on but thought provoking.”

The city as poem: Little Hunger, Feria, and Nightmarker (Jacqueline Turner, Straight.com, 2/12/2009)
“Oana Avasilichioaei frenetically pulls us through a whirlwind of historical constructions in feria: a poempark.”

Interviews

Interview (The Concordian, 11/11/2008)
"Avasilichioaei builds rather than writes, using words like layers of paint to lend her poems an inner richness.”

12 or 20 Questions with: Oana Avasilichioaei (rob mclennan, rob mclennan's blog, 28/06/2009)
“feria: a poempark, used a Canadian public space, a particular park in Vancouver, as a palimsest and was more architectural in nature, concerned with the physicality of a landscape that sustains much change over time, and less concerned with people or characters. There are no individual voices per say in feria, rather the echoes of collective voices.“

Videos

Oana Avasilichioaei reads the prologue from her collection feria: a poempark. A poetic frolic in Vancouver's Hastings Park, the book eludes boundaries of landscape, time and narrative.

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 this Author

We, Beasts (2012)

The Islands (2011)

Abandon (2005)