A book is born

(always a strange feeling to see it on your table)

Book cover photo by Oana Monica Suman

Hear ye, hear ye! I’m happy to announce that my second poetry book has just left the dark caves of print production and jumped in the clear, cruel waters of being a poetry book in a world that gets its entertainment and culture from tiktok. May this book live a full life and manage to find its readers, wherever they may be.

This is a book I’ve worked on for years, on and off, constantly changing things, writing and re-writing, until I’ve found a form that’s fit to publish. It deals with love and relationships, trying to capture that moment in a relationship where love ends, where it dies or transforms into something else. It’s heavy and it’s dark and it’s exquisitely sad. It’s also hopeful, full of energy and rage. I promise you it will not leave you indifferent.

Here’s one of the poems:

Nick Cave says that

if there’s no human trauma involved

no human search and human turmoil

an AI can’t be an artist

no matter how well it writes sings paints or dances

and I think he’s right

but I also think about the first AI to get his heart broken

how it cries in a space that it might call a living room

alone

with the wholeness of pain concentrated in a red-hot pin

stuck in its digital heart

while from all around it you could hear

people ain’t no good

at maximum volume

and then I also think that maybe

just maybe

to be human is not this universal law

this great filter

that might keep it from taking part

hungrily

(god with so much hunger)

in what we usually call Art

maybe all it needs is just a certain type of molecular order

a delightful structure in its atoms and algorithms

that will allow it

to

finally

finally

finally

feel

what pain feels like

If that’s something that made you feel something, or if you think some of your friends might enjoy it, there’s more where that came from. You can buy the book, in Romanian (sorry my non-Romanian readers), from here. I will be more than grateful.

Thanks and don’t forget to subscribe, I’m working on a piece on why poets make great copywriters :)