dor: Poetry by Alina Stefanescu
Winner of the 2021 Wandering Aengus Book Award!
Alina Ștefănescu’s DOR is a compendium of desire, displacement, longing, and belonging. While the word “dor” itself “serves as a bridge which creates its own territory from fusion,” here Stefanescu’s words do their own act of bridging the spaces between the body and language. In these poems, tongues, like nations, have borders; nouns and verbs come alive with ownership and agency. Stefanescu writes “a good girl poem waits // for the bass.” but these are not good girl poems. Part genealogy of influences, part meditation on love, lust, and loss, and part pointed feminist critique, DOR is a multi-faceted collection that creates a newly textured landscape of language.
— Emily Holland, author of Lineage and editor of Poet Lore
“You must write a self/ out of waiting/ to speak” asserts Alina Ștefănescu’s Dor and oh, what a prismatic, many-headed self has been written into existence within these pages. In her stunning second full-length collection, Ștefănescu explores the worlds contained in the Romanian word Dor— a word close to longing but with no exact English equivalent—as it relates to the speaker’s life as a daughter, a mother, a foreign body in a country that harms and holds us conditionally. Simultaneously tender and incisive, witty and full transformations, this book and its many ecosystems of longing and belonging begs to be re-read and promises new wonders each time.
— Jihyun Yun
In one of the beautiful poems in the collection, Dôr, Alina Ștefănescu writes of a “heart shaped like a shovel.” Indeed, Ștefănescu’s heart unearths the rich mysteries of an amalgam of Romanian and southern American culture in language deeply shadowed but attentive to the most telling of details. This is a collection that twists form and content into poems that are by turns tender or incendiary, or both.
— Erin Coughlin Hollowell, author of Every Atom
Looking at what makes her heart soar with DOR, Alina Ștefănescu leads us through undilluted layers of loss, love, time, language and identity, showing that „the verb for longing in Romanian is a mouth”. The condensed nature of the poems and their wordplay invite the reader into a world of sensation and memory where language shifts and blooms, filling mouth and eyes with delight, where, “any body is a bow, tuned to tremble.”
— Clara Burghelea, author of The Flavor of the Other
Some of the most complicated and haunting songs live inside these poems: nocturnes and fugues, the humming of wordless lullabies, birds who “sing in unpredatored darkness,” and most significantly, the doina—a traditional Romanian folk song of intense longing. That longing charges and electrifies this book: an attempt to hold the uncontainable, to name the unnamable, to translate an emotion that can’t quite be translated from one language to another. From inside these uncharted spaces, Alina Ștefănescu gifts us with this moving collection and all its rare, disquieting music.
— Matthew Olzmann, author of Contradictions in the Design
“And what is memory / if not fondled ache…” From the Romanian Republic of Alabama, “where longing is /a homeland”, Alina Ștefănescu’s Dor sings us back to the forgotten, the lost, the silences we hold and grow; here we learn, “looking back is a way of looking within”. These are poems that bruise in the way they remind us we are alive, “The gentlest fugue begins in fear/ of loss, and develops its argument”. Ștefănescu’s poems are soaked in vinegar, “the sour that protects” and revolve always toward what “failure fails to kill us”. We can’t remove what is already lost; the goat replaced is still missing, the mother lost is still with us. In this book, we learn our contradictions and our limitations; “It is the absence / of wings that teaches us to walk.” Writing us into this world, where a “city swallows whole stars” and “All executioners go home for supper”, Ștefănescu has made a mirror; if we are vulnerable enough in this American light, we will look—for in this collection, “the muscles of letters leave / irresistible witness to the world.” The book will singe your fingertips, show the life you are sewn into, feed you missing language, and cut through the deep-fake of not feeling. As the poet reminds us, “The danger is not dying but living in exile from / longing.”
— Amelia Martens, author of The Spoons in the Grass are There To Dig a Moat
Alina Ștefănescu’s DOR is a compendium of desire, displacement, longing, and belonging. While the word “dor” itself “serves as a bridge which creates its own territory from fusion,” here Stefanescu’s words do their own act of bridging the spaces between the body and language. In these poems, tongues, like nations, have borders; nouns and verbs come alive with ownership and agency. Stefanescu writes “a good girl poem waits // for the bass.” but these are not good girl poems. Part genealogy of influences, part meditation on love, lust, and loss, and part pointed feminist critique, DOR is a multi-faceted collection that creates a newly textured landscape of language.
— Emily Holland, author of Lineage and editor of Poet Lore
“You must write a self/ out of waiting/ to speak” asserts Alina Ștefănescu’s Dor and oh, what a prismatic, many-headed self has been written into existence within these pages. In her stunning second full-length collection, Ștefănescu explores the worlds contained in the Romanian word Dor— a word close to longing but with no exact English equivalent—as it relates to the speaker’s life as a daughter, a mother, a foreign body in a country that harms and holds us conditionally. Simultaneously tender and incisive, witty and full transformations, this book and its many ecosystems of longing and belonging begs to be re-read and promises new wonders each time.
— Jihyun Yun
In one of the beautiful poems in the collection, Dôr, Alina Ștefănescu writes of a “heart shaped like a shovel.” Indeed, Ștefănescu’s heart unearths the rich mysteries of an amalgam of Romanian and southern American culture in language deeply shadowed but attentive to the most telling of details. This is a collection that twists form and content into poems that are by turns tender or incendiary, or both.
— Erin Coughlin Hollowell, author of Every Atom
Looking at what makes her heart soar with DOR, Alina Ștefănescu leads us through undilluted layers of loss, love, time, language and identity, showing that „the verb for longing in Romanian is a mouth”. The condensed nature of the poems and their wordplay invite the reader into a world of sensation and memory where language shifts and blooms, filling mouth and eyes with delight, where, “any body is a bow, tuned to tremble.”
— Clara Burghelea, author of The Flavor of the Other
Some of the most complicated and haunting songs live inside these poems: nocturnes and fugues, the humming of wordless lullabies, birds who “sing in unpredatored darkness,” and most significantly, the doina—a traditional Romanian folk song of intense longing. That longing charges and electrifies this book: an attempt to hold the uncontainable, to name the unnamable, to translate an emotion that can’t quite be translated from one language to another. From inside these uncharted spaces, Alina Ștefănescu gifts us with this moving collection and all its rare, disquieting music.
— Matthew Olzmann, author of Contradictions in the Design
“And what is memory / if not fondled ache…” From the Romanian Republic of Alabama, “where longing is /a homeland”, Alina Ștefănescu’s Dor sings us back to the forgotten, the lost, the silences we hold and grow; here we learn, “looking back is a way of looking within”. These are poems that bruise in the way they remind us we are alive, “The gentlest fugue begins in fear/ of loss, and develops its argument”. Ștefănescu’s poems are soaked in vinegar, “the sour that protects” and revolve always toward what “failure fails to kill us”. We can’t remove what is already lost; the goat replaced is still missing, the mother lost is still with us. In this book, we learn our contradictions and our limitations; “It is the absence / of wings that teaches us to walk.” Writing us into this world, where a “city swallows whole stars” and “All executioners go home for supper”, Ștefănescu has made a mirror; if we are vulnerable enough in this American light, we will look—for in this collection, “the muscles of letters leave / irresistible witness to the world.” The book will singe your fingertips, show the life you are sewn into, feed you missing language, and cut through the deep-fake of not feeling. As the poet reminds us, “The danger is not dying but living in exile from / longing.”
— Amelia Martens, author of The Spoons in the Grass are There To Dig a Moat
Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Birmingham, Alabama with her partner and several intense mammals. Her writing can be found in diverse journals, including Prairie Schooner, North American Review, FLOCK, Southern Humanities Review, Crab Creek Review, Virga, Whale Road Review, and others. Alina is the author of Ribald, a prose microchapbook, from Bull City Press. She serves as Poetry Editor for Pidgeonholes, Poetry Editor for Random Sample Review, Poetry Reviewer for Up the Staircase Quarterly, and Co-Director of PEN America's Birmingham Chapter. A finalist for the 2019 Kurt Brown AWP Prize, Alina won the 2019 River Heron Poetry Prize.