Bøker av Anca Vlasopolos

Fires in the Dark is Anca Vlasopolos's eighth poetry collection. You'll find 75 poems in this volume-13 previously published and 62 which appear in print for the first time. In the author's own words, "I meant to dedicate this collection to one of my best readers and dear friend Deborah Robbins. Time's chariot crushed my intention, so this has become instead an in memoriam homage. She did see the last poem, and sent me a response, out of which I culled the epigraph for this volume. Two poems frame this gathering: the first ("See Them Rise") commemorates people whose sufferings and courage fuse with our resolve to rise and fight the dark; the last ("Fires in Darkness") is a meditation about a cosmos we mostly cannot understand and whose unimaginably minute particles light up in dance. In between there is the sans of aging and loss-of friends, love(s), our (perhaps only dreamed of) green and pleasant Earth but also awe and surprise at life's exuberant sprezzatura of mortality."

No Return Address is a vivid memoir of a life in exile and a poignant meditation on pleasure and loss, repression and transgression, and the complexities of love under harsh human conditions. In recounting her life's journey from Romania to Paris and Brussels, then on to the United States, Anca Vlasopolos writes movingly of the peculiar attributes of displacement in the contemporary world-the hyphenated, ambiguous identities; the purgatory in which immigrants await transfer to another country; the mysterious nostalgia for places and events dimly recalled. Throughout, she describes the constant search for a place to truly call home.Vlasopolos renders a clear and loving portrait of her mother, an Auschwitz survivor courageously raising a young girl by herself after the death of her husband, a political dissident. She details their years of limbo in Brussels and Paris and of settlement in Detroit, Michigan, as well as her ultimate decision to identify the United States as home, inspired by the strong multicultural quality that allows so many others to do the same.