Endorsements

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Geraniums in the Studio is a collection that invites us into a world rich in imagery and tales of

family, nature, and friendship. Lucia Cherciu’s poems share the intimacy of daily experiences

through varied landscapes of memory: from her garden to meditations on her homeland,

Romania. In this volume, the gifted artist Elizabeth Ross (1936-2021), sits alongside the reader

as a wise and benevolent presence, invoked by poems that bring Ross’s art, creative spirit, even

the light in her Colorado home, to life. In one of many memorable lines, Cherciu declares:

“Create your own table.” For us, her gathering of deeply-lived and deeply-considered moments

provides a language of abundance and tenderness where we can linger for many hours.

I am moved by Geraniums in the Studio partly because I knew Betty Ross, the extraordinary

woman and painter to whom the book is dedicated. These are eloquent poems of friendship and

memory, honoring art so deeply that “Even the grocery list is a love poem, a prayer.” Lucia

Cherciu explores the life of making and discovering, connections and losses. “A poem is a letter

sent over a grave,” she writes. As an immigrant from Romania, she knows the double life of

language and dream. As a true poet, she leaves us “feasting on sagacity and stories.”

Lucia Cherciu’s Geraniums in the Studio is rich in flowers, fruit, and trees—in nature, in art, and

in the memory of the emigrant who longs for home. “Immigrant” reads in its entirety, “All those

cups of coffee/I should have drunk/with my mother,//all those orchards/I should have walked

through/with my father.//Send some money home.” Raised in Romania during the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceauşescu, Cherciu writes, “My computer figured out/I want to buy a black dress/after I already bought a black dress//and now tempts me with black dresses.” She writes, “My neighbor has a TV as wide as the whole back of the house.//When the leaves fall, I could place a chair in my yard/and watch golf all day.” She plants trees in that yard, a big garden. This book is a bountiful harvest.

Lucia Cherciu’s Immigrant Prodigal Daughter knows how to “grapple / with the gravity of

grammar,” weaving together the author’s roots in Romania and her life in New York. It is not

easy work, yet there’s abundance here, too—from the orchards where a grandfather grafted three types of apple on a single trunk, to the fruit trees the poet later plants during lockdown. The gifts of these poems aren’t flashy but bone-deep, like the pillow from a grandmother’s wake. We’re reminded that home is both ache and welcome, distance and forgiveness. What a gift, then, to arrive at the table of these poems, rich with “wedding soups, roasted roosters, cherry preserves, // juices and sauces that splatter an arduous cook’s kitchen.”

Lucia Cherciu’s Immigrant Prodigal Daughter vividly conjures her Romanian past. Her poems

explore homesickness and loss, exemplified by the Romanian custom of giving away a dead

one’s belongings. Giving becomes the mirror-image of loss (“We Only Get to Keep What We

Give Away”), and language becomes the mirror in which the beloved past can still be seen. The

“longing for home, dorul” is counterbalanced and finally outweighed by the speaker’s

redemptive generosity. Her joy in giving, tending her garden, writing these poems, heals the rift

between worlds: “If my grandmothers can see me / they recognize the flowers of their youth”

(“The Privilege of Water”).

Immigrant Prodigal Daughter is a tender lament for a country left behind, but what is a country?

It is dirges sung, apricots, and lavender. It is capoate, the black housedresses worn by old

Romanian women. Amid the rich sensuality of memory, the poet takes herself to task. Has she

praised enough? Done too much? Not enough? “I have taken my child / away from my mother”

writes Cherciu, and yet what the reader overwhelmingly feels beside the vulnerable

self-questioning is a love song to family and an ode to ancestry.