Objects In Vases

by Alina Stefanescu

Alina Stefanescu's debut chapbook, Objects in Vases, explores how femininity creates a place—a space around us—to engage the viewer. Our experience of place is mediated by the ways in which we are perceived, or the vase in which others prefer to view us. The place itself is created by the act of placing. And yet the artificiality of being placed is a displacement from self.

A vase is a certain kind of visual grip, a way of holding an object in our perception, center-stage. But a place on the table is not a place at the table. Our first breaths are not drawn in vases. Rather, we originate in soils and places. These poems explore the ways in which we are contained, presented, and configured by culture. By observing how display removes us from our natural geographies, the poems also render human dis-placement, the stories of people dis-placed by the way we are socialized to view them.

Cover art and design by Christina Collins.

36 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2016

About the author

Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania and lives in Alabama with four incredible mammals. Find her poems and prose in recent issues of Juked, DIAGRAM, New South, Mantis, VOLT, Cloudbank, New Orleans Review Online, and others.

Her debut fiction collection, Every Mask I Tried On, won the Brighthorse Books Prize and will be available in May 2018. She serves as Poetry Editor for Pidgeonholes and President of the Alabama State Poetry Society.

She has a flower in her mouth.

Reviews

[Anchor · Rating 5 out of 5]

A clear strong voice in a powerful debut.

[David Kopaska-Merkel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mainstream poets often write obscurely, or about boring shit. Not Stefanescu. Her poems strike unerringly to the heart of humanity. She sees what is important, and tells us what one woman knows about it: children, a bizarre alien culture, love, how others see us, and so on. Everyday life, yes, but that's all there is, isn't it? Yes, all there is is exactly what you'll find in this book, or one person's piece of it. In words that say what they mean. You need Objects in Vases.