Alina Stefanescu, My Heresies

 

My Father Explains Why They Left Me Behind When Defecting

            in Hoa Nguyen’s unrelated future tense

You are the same to me.
The baby in the photo you were, dark
curls we kissed before fleeing.
Your mom was pregnant with
the one she birthed in america.
Your eyes didn’t match.
One was yellower.
And no leaves on the lindens then
we didn’t know if we’d see you again.
We didn’t know if we’d see you again
and know leaves on the linden, then.
One was yellower.
Your eyes didn’t match
the one she birthed in america.
Your mom was pregnant with
curls we kissed before fleeing.
The baby in the photo you were, dark
you are. The same to me.

The latest from Birmingham, Alabama-based poet, fiction writer and editor Alina Stefanescu, and the first collection I’ve properly gone through of hers, is the remarkable My Heresies (Louisville KY: Sarabande Books, 2025), a lyric exploration of being and becoming, of family histories and geographic shifts. “The first word wasn’t love, was it?” she writes, within the first poem of the two-part “Cosmologies,” “It was this once that sat upon a time we can’t locate / in physics. It was the science of bread / being broken and eaten. // I am still terrible at division.” My Heresies is a collection of big, complicated emotions, cultural collision and a fierce intelligence, composed with such a delicate and careful ease of the line. “I, too, would appreciate / being courted at the leveling / of the sacred.” she writes, as part of the short poem “Little Things: A Ring,” “If I can’t partake of the trifecta, / I will settle for that flaming / thing in the angel’s right hand.” The poems are expansive and intimate, containing the whole world and the author’s entire life in the smallest moment, the most contained set of sentences. Back in 2020 via the Spotlight series, she wrote of her paired elements of Romanian and Alabaman as opposed to Romanian and American, a duality that is very much at the heart of this collection:

I’ve been trying to reconcile the self with the borders of multiple identities. Perhaps parenting forces these thoughts to the surface somehow — for example, why I identify as Romanian-Alabamian rather than Romanian-American; and how the word “unamerican” has been used to describe (and shame) me so often that pinning “American” to myself feels like a moving target. Alabamian is easier if only because saying unalababamian is phonetically clunky and awkward and therefore most humans don’t invite it to their tongues.

If I write about the South and was socialized in the South, am I Southern? This is a question which depends on how I write the South. Every tough word I use is a wall I build in defense against the walls that I blame others for building and I have no self-defense against the irony and uselessness of that apart from my culpabilities.

With opening poem and five carved, numbered sections, there is an element of My Heresies of being constructed as a long sentence, a book-length suite of poems seamlessly stitched into a single, ongoing conversational thread. The poems are propelled by hush and halt, a tempo of thoughtful measure, articulation, excavation and archaeological play, but one that loops and reels and revels in repetition, managing to find new elements across familiar stories, familiar lines and phrases. “Failure to absorb the verb / and modify the actor accordingly.” begins the poem “Indictment for Failure to Conjugate,” “To sit and / play dumb.” There is also an interesting thread contained within this collection of the moments and lyrics of the late German-speaking Romanian poet Paul Celan (1920-1970), a poet with whom Stefanescu feels both cultural and poetic affinity. “Paul Celan begins with an act of self-naming.” begins the poem “Sonnet at the Ghost Commune,” “The poem claims the invention of self / on a Bucharest windowsill. Poets put // the moon in its place / at the horn of the table / on the shoe of the satyr folding laundry into bohemian ballet.”

There is such a detailed intimacy to this collection, and a sharp and open intelligence at play, one that invites the reader in as an equal, unafraid of what these lines might reveal. “My mother and I flit between French and Romanian / when sharing a bottle of wine.” the second part of “Cosmologies” begins. “In hindsight, the past tense overrides / the presence.” As the poem continues:

             My mother numbered her conquests but left them
nameless because sex is a comet that begins in a memory of longing.
The mother is a creature who teaches us to seduce it. “Sweetie,
you must do everything once,” she says. “Refuse to repent,
and don’t ever forget…”