The Brain Is the Ocean We Live In

<p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Growing up Cătălina typed her lyrical attempts on her father's very old typing machine. She would sneak out of the apartment go into her dad's office and type. The papers which she kept and brought with her from Romania to the States are so thin almost translucent. They resemble a dragonfly's wings and make the author be mindful of the fragility of our bodies and environments. Still if that gesture was a way to engage with writing without sharing the poems written in Romanian with anyone later in life the author discovered the healing power of creative writing. </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>The Brain Is the Ocean We Live in </em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>is Cătălina's second volume of poems after she published </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>The Night I Burned My Origami Skin</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>. The poems are almost exclusively written in her adoptive language with traces coming from her mother tongue. Moreover some of the poems are accompanied by the author's (recorded) voice which she finds to be very intimate and soothing allowing her to be in the room with her readers. Finally some of the poems have a surprising visual component; the author hopes to let readers who are more visually inclined read and see the poem (or at least one of its possible visual interpretations). Ultimately Cătălina hopes that the readers would reciprocate her overall playful style no matter how serious sometimes the topics are: loss disability inequity but also love community memories and so much more. </span></p><p></p>