Dan Sociu - Deep Fakes
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Bilingual Edition
October 8, 2026
ISBN 978-1-954218-50-5
Eastern European Poets Series #53
Distributed by
Asterism Books (US)
Turnaround Publisher Services (UK & EU)Support for this publication has been provided by a grant from the Romanian Cultural Institute's Translation and Publication Support program
Dan Sociu
Deep Fakes
Translated from Romanian by
MONICA CURE
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.
“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
“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
“Dan Sociu doesn’t give a damn if governments, officials, or established institutions approve of his poetry. That has been true since his student days, when he created platforms for art that didn’t pander to power or laurels. 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
“An impressive book—an excellent translation!” —Richard Deming
Born in 1978 in Botoşani, Romania, DAN SOCIU is the author of nine books of poetry and three novels, and has won numerous awards. His experience of homelessness and unemployment in his early twenties honed his attention to social realities. He has worked as a minimum-wage intellectual in journalism, editing, and as a translator of more than 30 novels from English to Romanian, the poetry of more than 30 British and American poets, as well as articles and plays. He co-wrote the Romanian science-fiction movie Monarh (directed by Dan Radu Mihai), and contributed to the story for the British movie Universe 25 (directed by Richard Melkonian) in which he also played the “The Saint.” He has been an artist-in-residence at Art Omi in the U.S. and at Akademie Schloss Solitude and Literaturhaus in Germany.
MONICA CURE is a Romanian-American poet, literary translator, and dialogue specialist currently based in Bucharest. She is a two-time Fulbright grantee and her poems and translations have appeared internationally in journals such as Poetry Northwest, Graywolf Lab, Kenyon Review, and Modern Poetry in Translation. Her translation of Liliana Corobca’s novel The Censor’s Notebook (Seven Stories Press) won the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize.
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