Alina Stefanescu
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alinaetc.bsky.social
Alina Stefanescu
@alinaetc.bsky.social
10K followers 4.1K following 26K posts
poet. writer. editor. reviewer. translator. corrupted bibliomaniac. exists in romanian and alabamian. hybrid in she/her dreams. self-deleting. self-ghosting.

www.alinastefanescuwriter.com
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alinaetc.bsky.social
rain, music, bassists, and a tribute to one of Birmingham’s music legends who passed away
Woman in black jacket and velvet pants Wires on a wall
December 19, 2025 at 3:50 AM
alinaetc.bsky.social
Another will smash the prison register, Another will smash the doors of the jail.
Another will wipe from our thin shoulders The dust and blood fallen from our necks.
—Péguy
December 18, 2025 at 12:53 AM
alinaetc.bsky.social
🖤
Be kind of weird sign on storefront window
November 14, 2025 at 10:32 PM
alinaetc.bsky.social
Michel Auder's "Seduction of Patrick" (1979) starring Gary Indiana and Viva is opening at the O-Townhouse in LA tonight, November 14th as part of the “Savage Men” exhibition. 🖤
November 14, 2025 at 10:13 PM
alinaetc.bsky.social
Walla Walla and Bataille’s solaire. 🙃
November 14, 2025 at 10:13 PM
alinaetc.bsky.social
Evergreen.
Cover of the Barbara Johnson reader, the surprise of otherness.
November 13, 2025 at 12:03 AM
alinaetc.bsky.social
breakfast was delicious
Cake
November 11, 2025 at 6:24 PM
alinaetc.bsky.social
I’m going to make a poem out of nothing.
You and I will be the protagonists.

- Luis Alberto de Cuenca
Luis Alberto de Cuenca William of Aquitaine Returns I'm going to make a poem out of nothing. You and I will be the protagonists. Our emptiness, our loneliness, the deadly boredom, the daily defeats: all these things will go into the poem, which is bound to be short, since they fit in a few lines, maybe as few as seven, or perhaps eight, if this last line counts. —Translated from the Spanish by Gustavo Pérez Firmat From issue no. 242 (Winter 2022)
November 11, 2025 at 5:05 PM
alinaetc.bsky.social
Finding a form.
November 11, 2025 at 3:26 PM
alinaetc.bsky.social
With you in the margins, Trevor. :)
“Nothing is more limited than pleasure and vice,” wrote Marcel Proust in Time Regained. “We can really, in that sense, in the changing sense of the expression, say that we turn eternally in the same vicious circle.” This image of an eternal vortex turning ‘in the same vicious circle’ launches an image of Auguste Rodin’s Paolo and Francesca into my head. Plucked from the gates of hell in the name of literature . . .
November 9, 2025 at 6:52 PM
alinaetc.bsky.social
The perfect brushstrokes of this poem by Elizabeth Willis.
Self-portrait with Imaginary Brother after Willem de Kooning Eventually the "imaginary brother" becomes a wife or a lover, a daughter or a wife. A "Woman Sitting" (1943) is sitting in the middle of a war. The breast that is showing does not appear to be loved. It lives in a society of thieves: no hands. Even the pink lady isn't pink, she's a head full of teeth. Now it's 1948. Painters may not be trembling, but the world is. Turned over, the secretary is a piece of furniture, her paint running upward impossibly from the face. She'll do anything you say.
November 9, 2025 at 4:06 AM
alinaetc.bsky.social
I sometimes think of my kind of autobiographical writing as spider's work, as pulling big glistening web out of one's very body. . .

— Edmund White, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir
I sometimes think of my kind of autobiographical writing as spider's work, as pulling big glistening web out of one's very body, of searching about for the twigs to attach one's floating gossamer constructions to, as bodying forth sticky patterned threads, the silk extruded by one's spinnerets, meant to catch something — maybe just a creature's attention or its nourishing substance. When the writer-spider has spun all his silk, must he stop secreting. — Edmund White, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir
November 8, 2025 at 8:49 PM
alinaetc.bsky.social
Thank you to the Piggly Wiggly parking lot for hosting my sad thoughts on too much Kierkegaard and a rainy Friday and the intractable parts of life that are not literature. 🖤
Selfie of woman in green coat in car
November 8, 2025 at 5:15 AM
alinaetc.bsky.social
Radu taking Bataille’s side on this.
November 8, 2025 at 1:30 AM
alinaetc.bsky.social
Incredible book.
November 8, 2025 at 1:29 AM
alinaetc.bsky.social
In times past, poets had a sixth finger on each hand
to better endure the ache of writing.

- Nasser Rabah, “Meditations”
. اكت باليب و ، لكن MEDITATIONS 1 In times past, poets had a sixth finger on each hand to better endure the ache of writing. They had three extra senses, to read the unknown, understand the language of bees, and heal lovers. They had nothing in place of a heart to traverse the pain of life except early death. 2 Our palms meticulously wash blood each morning in silence and with great devotion, and every night we diligently train them into knives. The sleeping child who left us at the hour of shelling, why did he forget the smell of his face on the pillow?
November 7, 2025 at 4:59 PM
alinaetc.bsky.social
This photo was taken by Dana Matar— and the words are used as an epigraph by Hans Blumenberg to his fantastic book, The Readability of the World.
November 7, 2025 at 4:56 PM
alinaetc.bsky.social
Up to your honeybasket hilts in her ore—or else Death? for yes
how gentle it is to go swimming inside her the secret swimming

- Anne Carson, "Mimnermos: The Brainsex Paintings"
fr. I What Is Life Without Aphrodite? He seems an irrepressible hedonist as he asks his leading question. Up to your honeybasket hilts in her ore-or else Death? for yes how gentle it is to go swimming inside her the secret swimming Of men and women but (no) then the night hide toughens over it (no) then bandages rusted with old man smell (no) then bowl gone black nor bud nor boys nor women nor sun no Spores (no) at (no) all when God nor hardstrut nothingness close its fist on you.
November 7, 2025 at 4:50 PM
alinaetc.bsky.social
Lydia Davis' "Revise: 2", for anyone who is revising.
revise:%202%0AContinue%20with%20Baby%20but%20remove%20Priorities.%20Make%20Priorities%20Priority.%20Cut%20inside%20Moving%20Forward.%20Add%20to%20Paradox%20that%20the%20boredom%20is%20contained%20within%20the%20interest,%20while%20the%20interest%20is%20contained%20within%20the%20boredom.%20Take%20that%20out.%20Find%20Time.%20Continue%20with%20Time.%20Continue%20with%20Waiting.%20Add%20to%20Baby%20that%20its%20hand%20is%20grasping%20the%20foot%20of%20a%20strange%20frog.%20Add%20Priority%20and%20Nervous%20to%20Revise%3A%201.%20Continue%20Kingston%20with%20Family%20and%20Supermarkets.%20Continue%20with%20Grouch.%20Start%20Kingston%20with%20Siberian%20Tiger.
November 7, 2025 at 4:47 PM
alinaetc.bsky.social
Dawdled by collaging my Halloween costume with the markings above particular entries Kierkegaard made in his journals near sections that later became STAGES OF LIFE. K. queered so many things it still blows my mind.
25 dollar wedding dress on left half within NB markings in various forms
November 7, 2025 at 4:03 AM
alinaetc.bsky.social
Shortbread with weed flowers from front yard
November 7, 2025 at 3:57 AM
alinaetc.bsky.social
treasuring this treasure on close reading edited by @johannawinant.bsky.social and Dan Sinykin. Last night was all Berlant and Ashbery vibes by Brian Glavey. Tonight will be more Berlant.
Cover of close reading for the 21st century Text from Brian glavey’s essay
November 7, 2025 at 3:56 AM
alinaetc.bsky.social
My “dulce periculum” vs. Kierkegaard’s “perissem nisi periissem.”
Photo of "motto" to Kierkegaard's "Guilty/NotGuilty" in Stages of Life.
November 4, 2025 at 5:51 PM
alinaetc.bsky.social
In a letter to Leonor Fini, Jean Genet celebrated her “indestructible ambiguity” -- and this strikes me as a wonderful compliment which Fini rightfully earned.
Painting of a skeleton with white furry hair holding a grayish silk scarf around her legs and looking to the right
October 26, 2025 at 11:21 PM
alinaetc.bsky.social
Well, Eliot Weinberger was wrong about nationalism and ethnocentricity but right about poetry.
The only belief that is salutary for poetry is the belief in poetry, which is never simple, and even less simple to maintain. Now, at the century's end, with the end of the ideologies and the imminent break-up of certain nations, the disease and threats of the next century will be nationalism, ethnocentricity, and all forms of excluding the other. Under the pressure of the expanding population, anyone not us will be seen as the cause of our misery. In poetry, if only for a moment, we are all us, all others – an us of others, and all of us talking. Eliot Weinberger, 1988
October 22, 2025 at 2:50 AM