Bridge

MARIN SORESCU (1936-1996) was a cheerfully melancholic comic genius, and one of the most original voices in Romanian literature. This book of wryly quizzical poems--his testament not just to human mortality and pain but to resistance and creative transformation--was composed over five weeks just before his death. Like a medieval dance of death but somber in movement, it's a procession of breathlessly spoken, painfully comic poems.