11 JUN 2020 · El mundo de Marjorie Agosín se despliega ante nuestros ojos en inglés y en español con esa desenvoltura característica de los continentes americanos que, muy a pesar del Hombre Blanco (de su casa, blanca) han sido y seguirán siendo vasos comunicantes. Bibliotecas y tigres que deambulan por ellas, madejas de incertidumbre que nos aglutinan, nieblas hechiceras de madrugadas y despertares, claridades fugitivas de ocasos, el amor y la espera, las vasijas llenas y los ojos vacíos… Todo ello habita el mundo de Marjorie, que os espera. [Catalina Iliescu]

29 APR 2020 · Those of us who experienced the earthquake of the March the 4th, 1977 still have a vivid memory of what it was and what it meant. None of us can remain passive to the slightest trembling whether it is the underground rushing towards its next station, or it is workers drilling to introduce pipes in the street down our block of flats. It doesn’t matter. Nor does the time gone by for that matter. It remains as one of the most intact memories in my generation’s and Domnica’s lives. In this story she half-fictionalizes it, reconstructing it for younger generations who, fortunately, haven’t gone through such trauma, in her personal narrative style brilliantly impersonated by Nikaury Rodríguez. No matter how much knowledge humankind has accumulated on tectonic plates, to this day, we remain helpless before nature’s primordial movements. We are able to predict almost everything. Earthquakes belong to that portion called “almost”. The splash of the tail of a huge and angry whale. Scream included. Because on that night, the scream of the earth was as indescribable as unforgettable. The sinister whitish light in spite of the darkness, the mixture of death and life, the crowds walking aimless through the streets of a Bucharest full of rubble and flooded by water bursting from broken pipes like in some colossal national funeral procession and the perplex sensation of not knowing whether to rejoice for the survival or mourn for the thousands buried, make this story An amazing piece of memorialistic literature worth being shared with as many people as possible. Domnica Radulescu’s brain is being excavated into by her probe-arm to whisk images like photos in a family album. She feels she is the sum of her memories while she rationalizes this assumption to be wrong. “This is you right here, right now!”, her brain says. But she keeps on going back from time to time.

29 APR 2020 · A new episode of the stream of consciousness that this quarantine triggered in Domnica Radulescu’s creative universe. The story of all the triggers that are spread all over her garden and the orchard at the back of her house reminding her of ancestral orchards seen, walked through and told about, the streets of her little confederate town, the avenues of big cities: Chicago, New York, Paris, the orgy of colours and smells in spring and summer, the cherry blossoms and the lilac fragrance enclosing the feeling of imminent catastrophes, the blue glow of snow, and the seasons which are not the same anymore. Own memories and received memories, like the Russian tanks and the American bombs from her parent’s childhood which were poured into her veins. Moving to a new country in boots worth mentioning and the immigration experience have their own trigger: a first American date, in the first American spring, with a first American record left unwrapped in a first American apartment. Records are patient and wait for us to discover them when the right time comes, since, as Domnica says, “everything has its own time”. The ever-luring idea for a novelist is “could anything have been different had I chosen to do otherwise”? Let us find out by listening to this story triggered by a cavernous voice and the poetry in it, discovered 35 years later.

16 APR 2020 · How My Grandmother’s Death Made Me Love Myself Again by Amy Oestreicher will make you shudder and reflect. Not bad for these quarantine times. It exudes tenderness, nostalgia, grief and catharsis. The reader goes through all these stages to finally understand the magnitude childhood feelings and teachings attain in our lives no matter if we do or do not have the awareness and the truthfulness to recognize it. Amy Oestreicher does. In American writer Domnica Radulescu’s words the story is “so absolutely both heart wrenching and exquisite… And so powerful”. Indeed the threshold between fictional living and living fiction is so thin in How my Grandmother…that it stops being a preoccupation. The audience’s focus is displaced towards how to possibly digest the near-to-death experience regurgitating the concentration camp survival in such a short life span. In literature time shrinks and expands and everything is possible. Apparently, in life too. Amy Oestreicher teaches us as much.

10 APR 2020 · After a photo by Michel Boulé on Unsplash Autor: Domnica Radulescu Lengua original: inglés Lengua lectura: inglés Lee: Nikaury Rodriguez To raise chickens for eggs. That is what logic requires. But nothing obeys logic in Domnica Radulescu’s garden, this garden of Eden where a man and a woman start anew. However, they are not Eve and Adam, but Lili and Ben, not man and wife, but mother and son, because motherhood is a tighter bond, strong enough for such a heavy burden like recreating humankind, giving birth to a more reasonable organization that does not fight, does not let peers die from hunger, does not allow blood sheds. Strangely enough, in Domnica’s Radulescu dystopic garden it’s April, like our quarantine! The verdict “April is the cruelest month” echoes the sorrow of a poet who longs for “forgetful snows” on his (waste) land, instead of spring renaissance with its creatures and sentiments breeding, mixing and stirring. The egg, a metaphor for life, beginning, renewal, but also the most visible side of maternity, of which the womb is only a synecdoche, solves the plot. The “old world” had succumbed to food wars, floods, draughts, and (again premonitorily), a “planetary illness that put a stop to just everything”. Domnica Radulescu’s love for all the languages in the world surfaces in the many names of an egg, together with colours, sizes and memories. Somehow this story seems to suggest that this couple’s knowledge of many languages is precisely the skill that helps them repopulate the devastated planet.