About the Author:
Adam J. Sorkin is an associate professor of English at Pennslvania State University.
Review:
Memory Glyphs makes a strong case for Romania's contribution to the evolution of the prose poem in the last few decades. ... In its diffuse nature, the prose poem demands both a poem and a theory of poetry. The three poets in Memory Glyphs may have little in common besides their Romanian heritage and the fact that they have individually mastered a form that few others have been brave enough to take on. For this reason, Memory Glyphs serves as an important addition to international poetics. --3:AM Magazine
A wildly roving narrative sensibility and the ability to render surreal images with poignancy and humor is a shared distinction in the work of these three poets, whose singular achievements and stylistic idiosyncrasies make Memory Glyphs a strange compound of elements, at once playful, confounding, inspiring and ultimately serious. ... Each poet ... takes his own path though darkness, humor, love, and mystery, and none is ashamed of groping aimlessly forward. The result is an unsettling pleasure, a collection of poems that grapple with our deepest questions, if only by representing the whims and cluttered wills of their authors. --Rain Taxi
If you thought that Romanian only comes into the spotlight when they usher forth their teenage uber-gymnasts during every summer Olympics, well, you're missing some seriously innovative literature. --Salonica
In his brief but illuminating translator's preface to the work of three Romanian poets born in the 1960s, Adam J. Sorkin describes prose poems as "a formless form, oxymoronic, with both lightness and heft, a chiseled, lapidary, elliptical poetry" that, according to Radu Andriescu, is "an abnormal mode of writing, marginal, irrelevant, and bookish." But anyone interested in the form or simply in challenging and sometimes brilliant writing will see through this false modesty. --World Literature Today
Paradoxically, although Romania is a very Francophile culture, and Romanian is the only Romance language in that part of the world, what we could call the "Romanian prose poem" is less influenced by the French tradition of the prose poem, its beginnings being closer to various forms of journalism (lyrical or satirical)--still practiced in Romania, where the most common profession among writers is that of journalist. --Three Percent
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