The Seizure of the Beast
A Post-research
Iulia Militaru's poems combine different types of speech, from medical and philosophy textbook to "newspeak," witness accounts, police reports, obituaries, and other written forms. Militaru turns on their head concepts about what we know and accept as poetry, truth, historical facts, philosophy, and language. A fierce feminist who explores the degrees by which speech and the performative act affect our relationship with the Other, Militaru creates unsettling idea collages that force us to examine the discourses throughout history and look at the world with unflinching eyes. The result is a text that draws surprising conclusions, points out absurd realities, and laughs in the face of norms—a dazzling, courageous tour de force.
Iulia Militaru is the editor-in-chief of frACTalia Press and the InterRe:ACT magazine. After a few children’s books and her study Metaphoric, Metonimic: A Typology of Poetry, her first poetry collection Marea Pipeada (The Great Pipe Epic) was published in 2010, receiving two major awards in Romania. A part of her video project, Dramadoll, co-authored with Anca Bucur and Cristina Florentina Budar, was selected for Gesamt 2012. Her collection of experimental poetry Confiscarea bestiei (o postcercetare) (The Seizure of the Beast. A Post-research.) was published by frACTalia Press in 2016. She has published poems and digital collages in MAINTENANT, A Journal of Contemporary Dada Writing and Art #9, #10, and #11. Her art exhibit “The Path. Filling-in Abstract Forms: Overwriting Barnett Newman” opened in 2016 in Iowa City at Public Space One. In 2016, she was also featured at The Third Annual Brussels Poetry Fest.
Claudia Serea’s poems and translations have appeared in Field, New Letters, Gravel, Prairie Schooner, The Malahat Review, Asymptote, RHINO, and elsewhere. She has published five poetry collections, most recently Twoxism, a poetry-photography collaboration with Maria Haro (8th House Publishing, 2018). Serea co-translated The Vanishing Point That Whistles, an Anthology of Contemporary Romanian Poetry (Talisman House Publishing, 2011) for which she received a grant from the Romanian Cultural Institute. She also translated from the Romanian Adina Dabija’s Beautybeast (Northshore Press, 2012). Serea is a founding editor of National Translation Month.
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