Archetypes in Code-Mixing Poetry

'Archetypes' is a collection of poems intent on revealing the deeper patterns of meaning beneath the surface level of language-that infinitely generative folk resource of words and syntax which streams through every border and connects all antipodes. Code-switching from English to Romanian with a virtuosic contiguity, Cristescu's evocations of an author divided between 'Ego,' 'Soul' and 'Self' are enigmatic and precise-they seduce the monoglot reader into the unfamiliar territories of a foreign language, and draw the casual observer into a verdant philosophical landscape. In the poems, familiarity and estrangement meet where word and object intersect, and the simplest images [...] pierce the page and become rich metonymies, carried along by the rhythm of lines; they are thoughts brought in heavy buckets over field and stream. These charged signs and symbols pour as water through 'branches and fingers, doors and circles' until they become 'lines on paper' read by 'humans learning letters.' / Luke Carman /