Dan Sociu - Deep Fakes
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Bilingual Edition
October 8, 2026
Distributed by
Asterism Books (US)
Turnaround Publisher Services (UK & EU)
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.
“An impressive book—an excellent translation!”—Richard Deming
“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
DAN SOCIU was born in Botoşani, Romania in 1978. He is the author of nine books of poetry and three novels, and has won numerous awards, as well as fellowships in the U.S. and Germany. Homeless for the first half of his twenties, he has worked as a minimum-wage intellectual in journalism, translation, and editing, and has translated over 30 novels from English to Romanian, the poetry of more than 30 British and American poets, as well as articles and plays, and has been an artist-in-residence in the U.S. and 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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