Temporary Skin

Artist: Cristina Iorga

I’ve been remiss at posting in this space—I’ve been busy with life, and writing, and traveling to places near and far—but I have some wonderful news that I’d love to share. My full-length poetry collection Temporary Skin has a cover and is due to come out soon from Glass Lyre Press!😍🎉💫 I’m beyond grateful to the Glass Lyre Press team: Ami Kaye, Kelly Cressio-Moeller, and Steven Asmussen for taking in this fledgling of mine and giving it wings. The cover artist is the brilliant Cristina Iorga, painter and printmaker, who also happens to be my sister. Mulțumesc, Cristina!

Here are a few endorsements from five fellow poets whose work I greatly admire. Each one of these kindred souls has changed me as a poet and their kind words in support of Temporary Skin mean the world to me.

I’d been seeing Romana Iorga’s good poems everywhere, and when I heard she had a full-length collection on the horizon, I was (rightly it turns out!) thrilled. My first time reading Temporary Skin, I noticed what I’d noticed in all her loose poems that’d caught my eye in journals of late—a singularly uncanny voice, nudging unabashedly toward truth: “I am your eye, hums / the stone,” she writes in one poem. “There’s a nothingness / sitting at an invisible kitchen table, / drinking the void,” she writes in another. The effect of reading an entire collection of these poems is utterly unmooring—being present for a mind so furiously curious, so comfortable in its own idiom. I’ll follow Iorga’s poems anywhere.

—Kaveh Akbar, Author of Pilgim Bell, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, and Martyr!

“This is the history of grief,” Romana Iorga writes in this moving collection that sings not only with grief, but with silences that are their own form of song. In these poems, family histories are entangled with narratives of loss and the many ways the skin both holds and fails to hold any history for long. Gorgeously rendered, these poems also embody possibility: beyond death and life, beyond sound and silence, beyond boundaries of time and birth and physical landscapes, Iorga’s poems implore the reader to consider the temporariness of all things, even memory, as “something you could, / maybe, come home to.” This is an exquisite collection that holds instead the reader’s attention and care, as it re-envisions the ways one asks to be held inside humanity, to belong “here.”

— Chelsea Dingman, Author of Thaw, Through a Small Ghost, and I, Divided

In Temporary Skin, Romana Iorga’s poems draw lyrically clear and poignant landscapes of loss and grief, tracking the places where the beloved was last seen—gardens in rain, cloudy cities, rooms in which people sit across from each other as if caught in a dream. One moment the beloved is there, and the next, it’s left behind only the seamless wound of its going. It may be that a broken clock “always shows the right time.” But the poet attends, as poets must, to the task of her devoted gathering. 

—Luisa A. Igloria, author of Maps for Migrants and Ghosts, and Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia, 2020-22 (Emerita)

In Romana Iorga’s Temporary Skin, the wound pulses, the grave beckons, the weather changes. The past is ever near, and the past is irretrievable. Folkloric, witty, and understated by turns, these poems shimmer with inventive metaphors, reversals, and self-skepticism, all of which remind us of the fundamental strangeness of existence, a strangeness we lose touch with amid the blur of the mundane. But more than that, Temporary Skin builds into a delightful exploration of the act of making itself and a meditation on language as method for restoring the fragments of our selves and our lives. “I am waiting to be returned to myself / in one piece,” Iorga writes—something we all long for, and something this collection gives us, poem by poem by poem.

—Molly Spencer, Author of If the House, Hinge, and Invitatory

Romana Iorga’s Temporary Skin takes up the oldest task that poetry puts before us: to use language to harness experience, and therefore more skillfully, truthfully, ride it. Richly surreal and visionary, the book tunnels darkly into nightscapes, interiority, memory, dreams. In language deft and gleaming as shards of obsidian, Iorga conjures landscapes whose trees “drop no fruit, except the knowledge of a world gone up in flames”; whose nights are “full of dark coats/ buttoned up on emptiness”; where “people and dogs [are] stuck/ up to their knees in our grief.” Trapped in the mazes and labyrinths of history, speaking from the coffin or the grave, seemingly wedded to her own damnation, our speaker still yearns to somehow hit rewind, to start over again in “a new Eden.” At the end of it all, Iorga shows us that poetry—arriving in the form of “a charm of/hummingbirds,” arriving as “a congregation/ of plovers”—is where our redemption lies.

—Claire Wahmanholm, Author of Night Vision, Wilder, Redmouth, and Meltwater

I will update this post when I have a definitive publication date as well as a preorder link. Thank you all for the support!