Video - Oana Avasilichioaei & Erín Moure Perform at Tree

Is the author of

feria: a poempark

published by

Wolsak & Wynn Publishing

Oana Avasilichioaei is a Montreal poet and translator. Her books include feria: a poempark (Wolsak & Wynn, 2008), Abandon (Wolsak & Wynn, 2005) and a translation of Romanian poet Nichita Stănescu, Occupational Sickness (BuschekBooks, 2006). She has performed from her work in Canada, USA, Mexico and Europe, and was the founder and curator of the Atwater Poetry Project reading series in Montreal from 2004 to 2009. This fall she is the writer-in-residence at Green College, UBC, in Vancouver. Her latest writing project is a debauched poetic tale about a child, a tyrant and a wolfbat.

Oana will be reading with Erín Moure from Expeditions of a Chimæra (BookThug, 2009), a collaborative work involving authorial and translational impossibilities.

Oana has given us two poems:

excerpt from “Il Giardino Italiano” in feria: a poempark:

Project a park into gardens a project

drawn-out  constructed orificing bloom.

“The meaning of becoming a historical subject.”

Liatris lavender euphorbias blue irises gunnera

: an archive.

To make a sentence with instances

blooms a present into a present.

To mix my breath with your breath in this moment is.

Such space is the space a tree breathes mixing breath with you.

To exalt in a tree’s exhalation, inhaling wind.

We are given such moments as gifts.

excerpt from “Airways” in Expeditions of a Chimæra

dear o, will you confess?

Excised from the body, what was coupled

is now words winged with air.

The bridegroom’s face alone against the priest’s stole

with the murmur of a confession.

If I had a tongue yet or still,

I would not stop this tale.

When I lifted my face from the scent of myrrh

and cloth, I would turn

my mouth to you, to hear.


Continued . . .