CARMEN FIRAN has published twenty books including poetry, novels, essays, and short stories in her native Romania. She has been living in New York since 2000.


The greatest living Romanian poet, Nina Cassian, has written this comment about Carmen Firan’s work: translated from the Romanian by Adam Sorkin and others, “Carmen Firan has many voice —almost a choir—which she controls equally, be they lyrical or realistically uttered, ideas turning to poetry, and poetry breathing ideas. That’s the strength and originality of her Rock and Dew.”

It has also been said by Andrei Codrescu that since moving to New York Firan has been writing poems that explore the New World with an “exciting view of life, love, and the meaning of existence, through the eyes of a renowned East European poet.”

“Carmen Firan’s beautiful and powerful poems, charged with gloom and passion, recreate her struggles not only with life and love, with her history and ours (and ‘its bloody hangover of the senses’), but with the beasts of language, whether invasive or voracious or fugitive. In this war of words, armed with her ‘dialect of Old Angelic,’ she indisputably wins.”—Harry Mathews