How to Live Under Facism

My new collection of poetry is a guide to living in the dictatorship of the new American plutocracy. I was born and raised in Romania, a national-socialist client of the Soviet empire, where poetry was always a nightmare for the state, and a lifeline to the terrified citizen. I emigrated to freedom in the U.S, where the subversive powers of poetry were slowly dissolving into badly-paid entertainment for easily distracted readers. The surveillance of the market wasn't yet as deadly as that of the communist censors, but their merger seems a done deal now. In the face of this civic catastrophe poetry has to be more than eau-de-cologne to dispel the stink of army boots. This book is occasionally clear about that, but there are also poems of love and the plague, childhood scents, the warmth of other bodies, the warnings of history, and the pleasure of making things up. I was taking photographs on my daily walks when writing these poems, without meaning to use them, but then I saw that they were strangely and not so strangely connected. My mother and father were photographers in the bad old days, I think their craft shadowed me. I dedicate these works to my predecessors.