Canting Arms

Poems

Emilian Galaicu-Paun author Adam J Sorkin translator Ilya Kaminsky editor

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Deep Vellum Publishing

Published:22nd Feb '24

Should be back in stock very soon

Canting Arms cover

One of Moldova’s most awarded poets, Emilian Galaicu-Păun’s style is rich with references at once playful and thematically serious, at times even comic.

Canting Arms, the first collection to bring Emilian Galaicu-Păun’s work to Anglophone readers, is comprised of a career-spanning selection of his work produced from 1989–2019. These poems—sardonic and visionary as well as surprising—unsettle the normative poetic form, a reflection of Moldova’s unorthodox national history as a product of the clash of many historical narratives of empire, a crossroad between East and West. This collection, the work of Adam J. Sorkin with six co-translators, shows everything from his earlier poems, full of scriptural and erotic references, to later work full of complex political, historical, and psychological considerations.

“Galaicu-Păun’s poetry is a volcanic, baroque discourse, expansive in its themes and relentless in its imaginative avalanches . . . [His] poetry essentializes even as it gets loose, and it also stretches at the very moment when the vision dramatically contracts.” —Al. Cistelecan

“Galaicu-Paun transforms the buzz of information into the pulsating lyric, the cavalcade of voices we live within becomes his fabric, language his material for new visions, twisted and transformed through the erotic and the divine. Galaicu-Paun writes a world of living tissue, bodies and blood, words and wit, driven by intense mental energy.” —Sean Cotter, translator of Solenoid

ISBN: 9781646052745

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

240 pages