Archetypes in Code-Mixing Poetry – Mihaela Cristescu, Luminta Serbanescu

Description

Archetypes is a collection of poems intent on revealing the deeper patterns of meaning beneath the surface level of language—that infinitely generative folk resource of words and syntax which streams through every border and connects all antipodes. Code-switching from English to Romanian with a virtuosic contiguity, Cristescu’s evocations of an author divided between Ego, Soul and Self are enigmatic and precise—they seduce the monoglot reader into the unfamiliar territories of a foreign language, and draw the casual observer into a verdant philosophical landscape. In Cristescu’s poems, familiarity and estrangement meet where word and object intersect, and the simplest images—a panama hat, a solander box—pierce the page and become rich metonymi …