My Heresies

My Heresies 

By Alina Stefanescu 

Sarabande Books, 2025 

Paperback: $17.95 

Genre: Poetry 

Reviewed by Laura Secord 

Alina Stefanescu’s collection, My Heresies, is wrapped with birds and sky and filled with loss, accusations, beauty, and betrayal. It broke my heart and left me returning again and again for a deeper understanding of its questions and its answers. 

Stefanescu’s initial poem, “Byline, Be Sky,” is a teaser for her telling through poetic forms and musical language: 

Through bears and blackbirds, under linden trees and kudzu tangles, she carries us through separation’s pain and desire’s conflicts, searching the mind and heart for answers. Stefanescu is a poet of displacement and resettlement, whose research and intellect are exploratory. She harkens back to broken attachments in a remarkable way with broken sonnets, golden shovels, and contrapuntal karaoke duets. My Heresies is a banquet.  

Her book carried me along a path of investigation, returning for deeper knowing. She paints her journey sometimes using direct narrative, as in my favorite, “Poem for the Blackbird,” placing us inside her mother’s response to “the house my dad won by divorcing” and claims “no poem bird could hold it”: 

Stefanescu sets the reader inside her mother, whose answer to pain and rejection is writing indelibly, defiantly circling her feelings with her anger. Truth as a form of heresy. 

The thread of Stefanescu’s mother’s death and unexplainable grief and longing is a thread Stefanescu readers know from her previous volume, Dor, and is this book’s continuing question. Stefanescu allows her parents to speak about the choice they made to depart Romania during the repressive Ceaușescu regime. Her poem, “Karaoke Duet for Eastern Bloc Defectors” is written in her parents’ voices. So terribly moving and separated in two columns, Doru’s song and Lydia’s song:

and later:

My Heresies is grief seeking answers, anger seeking expression, and one’s identity, becoming, and self-determination up against the wall of patriarchy’s staid spirituality. 

The linden tree appears throughout — this Eastern European tree thrives poorly in the south, yet Romanian families once lived under its sweet blooms. A metaphor for the difficult survival in a new country— “the battle between the linden and kudzu / begins early.” “I Nominate the Linden to Continue its Service as Tree of Longing and Aromatic Futility” admits: “Those that know me/ know lindens line the streets of my ink.”   

And later states: 

Worthiness. Stefanescu asks us to struggle for it as a daughter of a mother, who in “Cosmologies, II,” advises: “Sweetie, / you must do everything once… Refuse to repent and don’t ever forget.”  Still, the poet’s own eroticism and explorations are met with rejection in “After Reading the Extended Family Hate Mail”: 

She takes this exploration to the depths of biblical language, exploring Lucifer and the Fall in her poems “Mysterium, as Engraved on Pope’s Tiara until the Reformation” and “Evil Eye.” She explores patriarchal hatred in “An Intense Sense of Victimization,” a surreal poem with statements in the style of her hero Paul Célan. 

My Heresies keeps calling me back. It searches for understanding without pat answers or explanations. In “Epihaneia” the blackbird returns: “shattering its head/against the window near our bed.”  Stefanescu responds: 

Before her daughters, in “Letter with Heirloom Pen,” she concludes with a truth: 

My Heresies is a deep and multi-layered book. This reader feels compelled to return to the quandaries Stefanescu wraps around me. Beauty, music, loss, and uncertainty drive me back into this remarkable poetry. 

Laura Secord is a poet, storyteller, and teaching artist. Her novel-in-poems, An Art, A Craft, A Mystery, was awarded the 2024 Authors Award for Poetry by the Alabama Library Association. Her poems appear in Poetry and many other journals, and she serves as Director of Community Engagement for The Magic City Poetry Festival.