[10/08/26] Sociu, Dan: Deep Fakes

World Poetry, paperback

Translated by Monica Cure

Publication Date: October 8, 2026

Publisher Marketing: 

The poems of celebrated Romanian poète maudit Dan Sociu inhabit the margins of modern life, where personal confession meets social critique and irony deepens emotional truth. Sociu captures the melancholy of post-transition Romania in poems that are both autobiographical—influenced by his own experiences with homelessness, illness, and poverty—and collective. A poet of emotional precision, Sociu chronicles disillusionment, love, death, and survival with minimalist clarity and subdued lyricism. Here, the body dwells in abjection and vulnerability, yet fleeting moments of transcendence emerge through insight, tenderness, and ironic reflection. Deep Fakes, the first representative volume of his poetry to be published in English, spans more than a decade of Sociu’s work, from his Naive and Sentimental Poems of 2012 to the 2025 volume Sweet and Cheap.

These poems by Dan Sociu are smart while remaining warm and loving, and tragic without being maudlin. They are funny and direct and often, in the best possible way, unhinged. Their clear-eyed desperation is familiar to anyone who has read Eastern or Central European poetry, though here it is combined with the antic imagination of the Beats and the plain speech of the New York School. This book was a great pleasure to read, like hearing from a friend who is, like most of us these days, having a hard time, but also making it through. —Matthew Zapruder

Linking the defiance of punk with the self-shattering of mysticism, Sociu draws us into the landscape of postsocialist Romania without airbrush. Train stations, windows, and asphalt blocks become thresholds for his relentless poetics of existence. Again and again, Sociu insists that poetry doesn’t exist on a separate aesthetic plane from the body. The poem isn’t above the filth of being human; art isn’t an event outside of life. Monica Cure’s brilliant translation renders “a little man with his head in his hands,” carrying the violence and disquiet of neoliberalism into language. He offers no intermediary or solution to anguish or alienation. The poem has no savior outside itself. The raw livingness and splendor of these translations cannot be overstated. —Alina Stefanescu

Dan Sociu, the Charles Bukowski of Romania, gets you right in your gut biome where the AI dies. He’s all flesh tentacles. Feed him if you see him. —Andrei Codrescu

An impressive book—an excellent translation! —Richard Deming