Endorsements

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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.