WRITING ON THE WALLS AT NIGHT
In this new collection of prose poems, Claudia Serea uses surrealism, irony, and humor to express her experiences from growing up behind the Iron Curtain to emigrating to New York City. She conjures history through nightmares, folk tales, and dreams, remembers war and oppression through the eyes of a child, and escapes to a metropolis as strange as the past she carries with her. These poems are the magical beans the reader will use to escape again and again, discovering hidden portals with each new reading.
Poetry/ 978-1-956692-01-3/ February 15, 2022
In this new collection of prose poems, Claudia Serea uses surrealism, irony, and humor to express her experiences from growing up behind the Iron Curtain to emigrating to New York City. She conjures history through nightmares, folk tales, and dreams, remembers war and oppression through the eyes of a child, and escapes to a metropolis as strange as the past she carries with her. These poems are the magical beans the reader will use to escape again and again, discovering hidden portals with each new reading.
Poetry/ 978-1-956692-01-3/ February 15, 2022
In this new collection of prose poems, Claudia Serea uses surrealism, irony, and humor to express her experiences from growing up behind the Iron Curtain to emigrating to New York City. She conjures history through nightmares, folk tales, and dreams, remembers war and oppression through the eyes of a child, and escapes to a metropolis as strange as the past she carries with her. These poems are the magical beans the reader will use to escape again and again, discovering hidden portals with each new reading.
Poetry/ 978-1-956692-01-3/ February 15, 2022
Praise for WRITING ON THE WALLS AT NIGHT
Claudia Serea's world is as available to the senses as words can make it. Wheat, cement, earth, cities, and poppies pass through these poems steadily and true: you can trust them. This memoir is built on the unsparing consistency of Serea's gaze. A loving gaze. Stop anywhere in this book, it will be a real place.
—Andrei Codrescu, author of No Time Like Now (Pitt Series, 2016)
Writing on the Walls at Night deserves to be marveled at. Whether describing the personal or the political, the magical or the real, the bitter or the sweet, Claudia Serea evinces a poetic sensibility that is achingly empathetic and thoroughly authentic. There is not a false note in the entire collection. Indeed, these prose poems are among the most sincere, inventive, and moving being written today.
—Howie Good, author of Famous Long Ago
These are the stories that saucer-eyed audiences gather to hear a poet-witch tell-in deep blue-green forests, under rainbows. These are the yarns our ancestresses spun on cold winter nights when the harvest was done. When I read these fabulae, I'm transported to that place where light weaves the goddesses' dresses of gold. This is a magic book.
—Sharon Mesmer, author of Greetings From My Girlie Leisure Place (Bloof Books), professor of creative writing at NYU and the New School
Claudia Serea faces war with a poet's heart. The explosions are green and they happen in spring /. . .trees shoot up bullet-shaped buds . . . / The magnolia amasses fat grenades . . . Yet in spite all of the violence of Revolution and genocide, there is beauty and power on every page. Like the statues of Lenin that were turned into something useful: wheelbarrows, / shovels, and spades for digging up the past, Serea transforms history into dark fairy tale, into survival, into pages that all of us should read and treasure.
—Shaindel Beers, author of Secure Your Own Mask, Finalist for the Oregon Book Award
About CLAUDIA SEREA
Claudia Serea's poems and translations have been published in Field, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, Notre Dame Review, The Malahat Review, The Puritan, Oxford Poetry, Asymptote, and elsewhere. She is the author of five other poetry collections and four chapbooks, most recently Twoxism, a collaboration with visual artist Maria Haro (8th House Publishing, 2018). Serea's poem My Father's Quiet Friends in Prison, 1958-1962 received the New Letters Readers Award. She won the Levure Littéraire Award for Poetry Performance, and she was featured in the documentary Poetry of Witness (2015). Serea's poems have been translated in French, Italian, Russian, Arabic, and Farsi, and have been featured in The Writer's Almanac. Her collection of selected poems translated into Arabic, Tonight I'll Become a Lake into which You'll Sink, was published in Cairo, Egypt, in 2021. Serea is a founding editor of National Translation Month, and she co-hosts The Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Readings in Rutherford, NJ.
