Temporary Skin

In Romana Iorga’s Temporary Skin, the wound pulses, the grave beckons, the weather changes. The past is ever near, and the past is irretrievable. Folkloric, witty, and understated by turns, these poems shimmer with inventive metaphors, reversals, and self-skepticism, all of which remind us of the fundamental strangeness of existence, a strangeness we lose touch with amid the blur of the mundane. But more than that, Temporary Skin builds into a delightful exploration of the act of making itself and a meditation on language as method for restoring the fragments of our selves and our lives. “I am waiting to be returned to myself / in one piece,” Iorga writes—something we all long for, and something this collection gives us, poem
by poem by poem.

—Molly Spencer, Author of If the House, Hinge, and Invitatory