Writing on the Walls at Night

In this new collection of prose poems Claudia Serea uses surrealism irony and humor to express her experiences from growing up behind the Iron Curtain to immigrating to New York City. The first section of the book There Were No Magic Beans recalls her childhood in Romania under Nicolae Ceau?escu's rule a world in which terror mixes with fairy tales nightmares and dreams. The second section The Keepers of Moon Keys introduces a cast of peculiar characters including folk tale protagonists witches ghosts a collector of clouds a bone music maker a man who paints the time and the Lord of Meanwhile. In Dark Calligraphy the poet conjures history remembering war and oppression through the eyes of a child. The reader is guided by a little girl and a museum custodian through the great traumas of recent history. In the last section of the book The Russian Hat Serea transports the reader into a metropolis as strange as the past she carries with her to the museum of our lives where we are the curators the visitors and the paintings that paint themselves. This astonishing place vaguely resembles New York City distorted by memories and dreams but it might as well be Las Vegas where what happens in the poem stays in the poem. In this collection Serea's readers win pound after pound of shiny poems the magical beans they will use to escape again and again discovering hidden meanings with surprise and delight in each new reading.