Mystic-heretic-philosopher-poet Alina Ștefănescu’s newest collection of poetry, My Heresies (Sarabande 2025) is a radiant skirmish of families and selfhood, countries and allegiances, rules and refusals, and the force with which fraught love (is there any other kind?) bends us to its glitchy, kitschy will.
“Poetry never stops imagining the form that can hold us,” Ștefănescu wrote. “The poem does not take ‘no’ for an answer: it jumps the fence.” Rather than conclude or accept, My Heresies asks again and again what we could be to each other and what the price—the cost—of conformity is.
For as grounded as her poems are, their sensuous porosity recalls Hélène Cixous: “A feminine textual body is recognized by the fact that it is always endless, without ending. There’s no closure, it doesn’t stop.” A fluid slippage lubricates her thoughts, carnal, ludic and incisive, on what we owe—and don’t—to each other between birth and death. These, “unsayables that drive the having-said,” kept flowing through my mind long after the reading was done.
When I asked after one of her beloveds, Alina wrote, “He is as wonderful and terrible as the poems he courts on the front porch. He has turned his melancholic heart away from books and invested in birdwatching and […] bumblebees. I could not be more proud—or more embarrassed. Love impels us to recognize how the beloved is seen by others, which is often much less appealing than we care to admit.”
Would it surprise you to know these passionate wrestlings arise from Radu, her plucky Schnauzer companion, despiser of cellos and ponderer of the abyss? You see, in Ștefănescu’s hands, all creatures are capable of exquisite pleasures, poignancies, and aches. We are each other’s empyrean heresies and hadean joys. “We collaborate in creating the conditions for our own self-destruction,” she wrote. I have never been so inspired to sacrifice myself on the altar of dignity.
Our exchange took place via shared document between Birmingham, Alabama, at 12:14 a.m., Ahipara, New Zealand, at 1:46 p.m., and Seattle, Washington, at 5:57 a.m., amongst others, which is to say, we meandered inside and outside of space-time to discuss the sacred and the profane. This interview has been edited for length and flow.
***
The Rumpus: How would you describe heretical form or style?
Alina Ștefănescu: In May 1911, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, “I cannot comprehend religious natures who accept and follow God as given and assent him with their feeling without trying their hand at him creatively.”
Fifteen years later, Marina Tsvetaeva wrote to her friend and interlocutor, Boris Pasternak, “I don’t know what sacrilege is. All sins against grandeur of any kind… are one and the same. All others—a matter of degree… That which burns without heat is God.”
I quote these poets to indicate the direction of My Heresies, since I’m not sure it is contained or containable by form. When writing, I continue a dialogue with a text; some conversations began on my knees.
Sacredness makes profanation possible. Only the holy can be profaned. Heresy is an act that profanes the sacred text, which is to say, interprets this text in a way that’s threatening to clerics and religious institutions. Heresies are dreamy, to me. They nudge us to think, to imagine, to forsake the given scripts and safety associated with conforming to received beliefs and conventions.
Rumpus: Where did these poems begin, and how did you work from drafts through revision?
Ștefănescu: I wish I had a process. Unfortunately, each poem begins in its own way and pretends to be finished in its own way. I’m a bit of a fiddler. If someone doesn’t take the poem away, I’ll fiddle it straight through the inferno of all possibilities. I keep revising even after a poem is published. Nothing is settled or perfect in my hands. Nothing is finished.
It starts with the eye and the ear: music, soundscapes, embodied experiences, paintings, sketches, images. Serendipity and coincidence are sources of continuous astonishment.
Rumpus: How did you select the cover image, a curved, glistening pink tongue yoked with a gold ring?
Ștefănescu: Credit for that very visceral pink cover goes entirely to the design team at Sarabande. I am intrigued by the tongue’s shadow and the possibility of a wedding ring resembling the sort of torture administered to heretics who spoke incorrectly about god.
We don’t use the word blasphemy much anymore; it seems meaningless when the entire Trump regime speaks in the name of an American Jesus. To add heresy to heresy, one could read this cover as an alternately gendered “circumfession” in the vein of Jacques Derrida.
Rumpus: I admire the way your poems get down on the rug and wrestle. The contrapuntal tussle in “Karaoke Duet for Eastern Bloc Defenders” sparks a quote by Timmy Straw in McSweeney’s that poetry wants an adversary. Does this ring true?
Ștefănescu: Irreverence, for me, touches on boundlessness. A love rich enough to play with itself must be irreverent, must laugh at its own seriousness and limitations. Love surprises us by rupturing the boxes and plans intended to contain it. Karaoke duets give us love at peak kitsch.
Since karaoke involves the performance of songs written by others, the pleasure of performing is soldered to the imagining of being that particular singer. Cher’s “Just Like Jesse James” is the one I dropped in a karaoke performance to the man I eventually married—despite hating marriage and wanting only to continue our dalliance—despite loathing this institution that commits me to being one thing, a “wife,” to him.
I thought desire was the risk, but, paradoxically, in his usual Kierkegaardian fashion, the Man upped the ante by daring me to do the one thing I feared most. “Come on baby, you know there ain’t nothing left to say / If you can give it / I can take it”—that’s our dance. Like Cher’s song, it’s cringe as hell, this whole thing we have been doing for eighteen years, particularly since it’s never clear which of us is the “outlaw” or what “law” is being broken. Our roles evolve but the dare is always there. “So, if you’re so tough / Come on and prove it . . .”
Can you dance in chains? How does the constraint of form change the shape of the poem? How does the spoken (or sung) poem differ from the text (or song lyric)? How many ways can we change and still remain the same people to each other? My partner is a kind adversary of sorts. His scent moves through many of my heresies.
Legends, myths, and homelands are frenemies as well. Thinking about my parents and their performance of Americanism as refugees in a strange land is easier in the storytelling mode that some of these poems employ.
Once upon a time, in a land that was bombing another land, I sang Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” aloud with a friend. She stopped and looked at me. “Is it weird for you to sing this song, since it’s not about you, and you’re not really American?” she asked. At the time, I shrugged and said no. The music didn’t express who I was; it didn’t define me. It was no different than singing a Lil’ Kim song. I realized that her relationship to that song was implicated in a feeling of belonging and being “American.” She knew who she was and who I wasn’t.
The “once upon a time” mode implies a shared heritage, a subtext based in natalism and birthlands, in this construction of selfhood from local legends and superstitions, which, to me, resemble the sacred relics of saints. Relics are material objects while legends are closer to cosmologies, the stories from which we descend.
To be “an alien” is to fashion one’s selfhood from materials not found on the planet. An alien’s kryptonite is her cover story, the language she tames and refashions to fit her foreign body. She needs to get away with it: to pass as harmless, to defray the threat of not being born here, not sharing that reified status. Immigrants become conscious of this in many ways, particularly if they speak a minor language, like Romanian.
Monolinguists have a strange tendency to make themselves the center of conversations that happen in languages they don’t understand. When people speak a foreign language in their presence, they feel excluded, a situation that is frequently resolved by banning the language that leads them to feel excluded, but language itself is the homeland for an alien.
To be torn from your mother’s tongue is to be cursed, obliterated, extinguished in any form recognizable to one’s self. There is no way to describe how much it hurts to be ripped apart and left to move through the world in a body whose phantom limbs tingle. I keep trying—and failing—to describe the nerve pain of losing entire worlds that exist for me only in spoken Romanian.
Rumpus: The palindromic “My Father Explains Why They Left Me Behind When Defecting” feels like a response to a repeated question whose previous answers haven’t satisfied. The family’s diasporic fracture ripples infinitely.
Ștefănescu: Immigrants send their children over borders—or leave them behind border walls— out of love and radical hope for a livable future. I am hollowed out by the construction of refugees and migrants as “enemies” or threats to the purity of our nation. I am gutted by every headline that downplays the inherent racism of our immigration policies. We have lost our minds in the name of a fetishized safety that protects us from the Other by weaponizing difference. The monster is Us—not Them.
“The imagination; that is, the way we shape and use the world, indeed the way we see the world, has geographical boundaries like islands, continents, and countries,” wrote Guy Davenport, adding that boundaries can be crossed. I would go further and say these boundaries must be crossed. This is the work of the poem: to ruin reified boundaries by luring us—formally, linguistically, etymologically, surreally, recklessly, inappropriately, endlessly—towards the possibilities of unboundedness. Poetry never stops imagining. The poem does not take “no” for an answer: it jumps the fence.
Rumpus: In “The Kraków Nude,” the “crushed velvet of black mold lined / each air vent. Valiant rats scattered their marble feces.” Insolence, described as “empyrean,” nods at heaven and slant rhymes with empire and the patriarchal scarlet letter of “divine crimes across my chest.” What does the speaker realize “now,” which is “the opposite of then”?
Ștefănescu: Living in low-income housing depends on landlords. In the US, where it is profitable to cheat consumers, slumlords are no different from hedge fund owners. “The Kraków Nude” reaches back to the time when I was a single mom (this term bothers me because it idealizes the nuclear family) living below what some call the poverty line.
I was exhausted and broke, yet happy. I belonged to myself. I owed nothing to a man or partner; my days were filled by paid labor, unpaid labor, and the profound, world-changing joy of sharing my days and nights with a tiny human. The photo was taken in Kraków. I loved living in an apartment where I could smile at that nude without relegating her to the dustbins of history. It was incredibly romantic, this time in which I was my own.
The poem refuses to groom itself into the moral hygiene we expect from mothers. The woman is not sacrificed to the child. The Mommy Industry would file her in the “bad mom” category. I resent the “mommy wars” assumption that we should evidence our goodness continuously; this expectation seems related to a natalist politics that strips reproductive autonomy from wombed persons. To paraphrase Leonard Cohen: if you want it dark, I’ll make it darker. The poem’s speaker won’t apologize for loving or living it. The “good mother” constructed by mainstream therapeutic culture is always en route to her latest beheading. I’m tired of the pyres. No human should be dying to please the mommy market.
Rumpus: There’s a surrealism to your work, a way of rearranging the familiar into the seductively estranged, the defiantly errant. Can you talk about the intersection of defection, socialization, and heresy in the “Socialization” poems?
Ștefănescu: “The defiantly errant.” I love this lyrical phrasing of my bullheadedness. Poetry is life for me. It gets written on any available surface: an exposed forearm, a notebook, a restaurant menu, a symphony program, a drugstore receipt.
Nothing is more frightening to me than perfectly normal, stable Americans. Our imperious national posture is daunting. I’m not sure how anyone could aspire to normalcy in a country that prides itself on anti-intellectualism and bomb-based exceptionalism. What is normal about our for-profit healthcare system? What is normal about pledging things to a piece of fabric that represents the latest government, purchased by billionaires? What is normal about policing purity and moral sanctimony? As long as the word “normal” naturalizes what exists, I urge the young to resist being normal and to refuse the sorts of success that result from being compliant with it. Honestly, “normal” people are terrifying.
Socialization refers to the process of learning to behave in a way that is acceptable to society. Socialization starts with language, words, relational expression: we are told which words to use when expressing desire, pain, fear, contentment, et cetera. We are taught what to say and how to say it. We are punished for wanting or being the “wrong” way.
Mothering changed my relationship to language. Infants are small clingy animals who rely on scent, sound, and familiarity. I couldn’t punish a toddler for crying or expect an infant to cry alone when the only thing they wanted was to be held and soothed. Surely, we should all be held and soothed. Tenderness isn’t an add-on: it is the heart of learning what it means to be human, to be beholden by and to others. My now-fierce daughter would have episodes of inconsolable tears as an infant and the only thing that soothed her was burying her face in my neck, smelling me, like a small animal. Funny how kids grow out of the things that self-help primes us to fear.
What if the Pacifier Alarmist Squads and Thumb Sucking Police invested their energy in mutual aid groups instead of scare campaigns? Caring for dependent humans forced me to reconcile with my animal self. Nothing radicalized me as intensely and continuously as being the primary caregiver of small creatures who never asked to be born, who cannot possibly deserve the cruelty this world offers them.
Rumpus: I whooped for the heresy of gender modification in the golden shovel, “Mysterium, as Engraved on Pope’s Tiara until the Reformation.” How did Revelation 17:5 become the spine of reimagining the whore of our current Babylonia?
Ștefănescu: At the risk of being elliptical, spines are the rug that holds the incarnation together. As for the Babylonian whore, she resembles the slut, the mother, the virgin, the wife: words for roles that position women to be evaluated for their uses. Utilitarian calculations are built into the shifting conceptions of what a wife should bring to the table; we assume that love can be part of an evaluative domain that is practical and ends-based.
Anyone who has been in love knows better. Love can be quite miserable. It destroys families and conventions and it refuses to be controlled or tamed. This instrumental approach to love where the end-goal is happiness reconstructs love for the industrial age and labor economies. What the sociologist Georges Simmel called “the invasion of the domain of love by the teleological category” is also at play in My Heresies.
Rumpus: The subatomic scale of “An Intense Sense of Victimization” is disturbing in a fruitful fashion. Anaphora applied to victimization makes it feel inbred yet elemental; it demands to be fed with an infant’s urgency.
Ștefănescu: The most consistent identifying trait of contemporary neofascist hyper-nationalists, and ethno-extremists is a sense of victimhood and deprivation. Even their primary group identification is insecure for them: they feel as if their flag or what it represents is constantly under threat from an impure Other who wants to destroy them, deprive them of their “inheritance,” and humiliate what they hold sacred.
Confederate statues preside over the public squares of our shared imagination. Children look up at these fools on horses. I could write a book on that position, that way of being frozen in this act of looking up. Religions have stepped into this space by cashing in on a god’s promises, whether in sacred texts of divine origin, personal revelation, televangelism, conquest by missionary, et cetera.
The sexual form known as the “missionary position”—what “mission” are we on? Which god is being pleased by our missionary positions?
Rumpus: “Posthumous Journey IV,” suggests a cycle of life-death-resurrection. Profound pain (“my thigh-stitch purples… the humiliating publicity of almost dying”) is twisted with sensuousness. Likewise, la douleur exquise and le petit mort—without these deaths and pains, is one alive? What irony that, as women, we comfort others about our own pain, including those who caused it.
Ștefănescu: At fifteen, I was hit by a truck when crossing the street. I broke a bone at the base of my skull (among other things) and almost died. The worst part of returning to consciousness—worse than physical pain, amnesia, extensive surgeries, and rehab—was reading the agony on my parents’ faces, a helplessness and fear they attempted to guise. I learned very young that I would die, that death is always near, always possible, never something that only happens to elders or abstract others. This poem seeks to encounter a shard of that self.
It exists in dialogue with Ryszard Krynicki, who wrote a series of phenomenal poems titled “Posthumous Journey,” translated from the Polish by Alissa Valles. Virgil made the palace echo with howls when Dido burnt herself to death—“Lamentis, gemituque, et foemineo ululato, texta fremunt”—ululato evokes ululations, sounds made by Romanian villagers at weddings and funerals—sounds I’ve heard Palestinians make in videos. I am utterly silenced by the resonance of these vocalizations.
Rumpus: Is there a poem in My Heresies that took you by surprise, got caught in your hair?
Ștefănescu: Maybe “Sky B-Sides.” Not the writing of it, but the decision to submit it as the companion to “Skyline, Be Sky.” Where “Skyline” foregrounds the lyric, “B-Sides” arises from materials on the cutting floor. It is of the ground and on the ground. It rises above nothing, reaches towards no sublimity…
I was reading John Cage at the time, wandering through music theory and collage forms, thinking alongside Noah Adams’s statement: “When you edit audio tape, when you cut it with a single-edge razor blade and splice it back together in a new place, you are shifting reality; the words, the notes you have excised, no longer exist.”
I wanted to ride my own ellipsis into the sunset.
Rumpus: What questions did My Heresies raise that you’re writing into now?
Ștefănescu: It’s always a different experiment with infinity and unboundedness. I am a creature of passion: I marinate in it. All the ways this body has tangled with others changed the conditions of existence, altered the parameters of the given. This is why looking at old photos feels like reading a story about someone else, a human who becomes a character, this girl I was, who believed XYZ. She is unfathomable, yet I am fascinated by her hunger to live and feel. I am interpolated by her shadow.
Only by repudiating or condemning her could I be entirely free of her, and this would be a murder, since no one else has the power to kill her. No one else is similarly haunted by her. In appropriating her moments, I objectify her, which is another way of saying I tried not to objectify anyone except myself. Specific conditions, namely, the conditions of text, necessitate the death of the author.
