Alternating Current’s annual literary journal dedicated to historical and contemporary views on history contains poetry, maps and historical photographs, fiction, essays, articles, and nonfiction by various authors, both contemporary and historical, about various topics of history. Within these covers fantastically drawn by artist Terry Fan, you’ll meet the Romanovs, Serbian poet Vojislav Ilic, Dr. Zhivago, Stephen Crane, Geronimo, Lord Strathcona, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. You’ll learn of the misprint in Herman Melville’s obituary, the constellations in the Southern Planisphere mapped out by Nicolas de La Caille, what might have been exchanged between William Wordsworth and Thomas Carlyle, how Laura Cereta thrived on insomnia, and who’s buried in the cemeteries at Pere-Lachaise and Montparnasse. Our first Featured Writer, A. Jay. Adler —— an interviewee for a junior fellowship at Harvard Society of Fellows, Vermont Studio Center grant recipient, and Maui Writers Conference Screenwriting Competition prize winner —— will take you through Jewish life on the Lower East Side, Van Gogh’s mental asylum, Route 66, and the bordello rooms of Old-West Tombstone. Our second Featured Writer, Jesseca Cornelson —— a Catskill Center’s Platte Clove Preserve and a Sundress Academy for the Arts’ Firefly Farms resident artist —— will take you through the Tablet of Daughters, Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville’s journals of the South, and a history of her home state of Alabama’s unfortunate past with racial lynchings. Their work is showcased next to three of our Pushcart Prize nominees and the first, second, and third places, and nine notable-mention finalists, for our 2015 Charter Oak Award for Best Historical. From the Wild West to the Holocaust to Lincoln’s exhumation to the folk music of the sixties to the lost city of Atlantis, you’ll discover entire past worlds between these covers and meet a cast of characters colorful enough to color every page.

Footnote #1: A Literary Journal of History

Serea, Claudia

Current, Alternating

Angstman, Leah

Penick, Robert L.

Collins, Christina Elaine

Adler, A. Jay

Cornelson, Jesseca

Bassen, L. S.

Kojadinovic, Miodrag

History

Alternating Current

In this largely autobiographical collection of 74 short prose poems, the poet presents her life in three sections. “Angels & Beasts” recalls her early years under the regime of Nicolae Ceasescu, a world of secret terror in which the child interweaves reality and malevolent creatures from Romanian folklore. “The Little Book of Answers” covers the years between the Romanian Revolution (1989) and Serea’s emigration to America in 1995. Finally, “The Bank Teller’s Name is Jesus” involves the immigrant’s impressions of her new home, always colored by the past she carries with her. Serea’s masterful use of brevity, surrealism, irony, and black humor allow her to express —and the reader to confront—unspeakable horrors. She is a survivor, but a survivor with wide-open eyes, determined to move forward holding the darkness and light together.

Angels & Beasts

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Phoenicia Publishing

Poetry. Like King Charles III's apocryphal diary entry from July 4, 1776 from which this book takes its title, these poems remind us that it is only from the perspective of time and distance that we come to understand what is truly important in life. The life of poet Claudia Serea has taken her from the streets of Bucharest during the bloody overthrow of the Ceausescu regime through the experience of an immigrant in New York City and the tension and tangle of traveling back and forth between her native Romania and her newfound home in New Jersey. And like the simple clothesline on the cover that in one poem relates a tragedy and in another the exquisite beauty of the mundane, Serea's wondrously observant verse celebrates the potential in each moment, the revolutionary act of merely being alive.

Nothing Important Happened Today

History & Criticism

Broadstone Books

In this new collection of prose poems, Claudia Serea uses surrealism, irony, and humor to express her experiences, from growing up behind the Iron Curtain to immigrating to New York City. The first section of the book, "There Were No Magic Beans," recalls her childhood in Romania under Nicolae Ceaușescu's rule, a world in which terror mixes with fairy tales, nightmares, and dreams. The second section, "The Keepers of Moon Keys," introduces a cast of peculiar characters, including folk tale protagonists, witches, ghosts, a collector of clouds, a bone music maker, a man who paints the time, and the Lord of Meanwhile. In "Dark Calligraphy," the poet conjures history, remembering war and oppression through the eyes of a child. The reader is guided by a little girl and a museum custodian through the great traumas of recent history. In the last section of the book, "The Russian Hat," Serea transports the reader into a metropolis as strange as the past she carries with her, to the "museum of our lives," where "we are the curators, the visitors, and the paintings that paint themselves." This astonishing place vaguely resembles New York City distorted by memories and dreams, but it might as well be Las Vegas where "what happens in the poem stays in the poem." In this collection, Serea's readers win "pound after pound of shiny poems," the magical beans they will use to escape again and again, discovering hidden meanings with surprise and delight in each new reading.

Writing on the Walls at Night

Unsolicited Press

Romanian-American poet Claudia Serea documents the end of the Ceausescu regime in these poems of first-hand witness. Romanian-American poet Claudia Serea was a witness to the last days of the Ceausescu reign of terror and a participant in the revolution that toppled his regime, so her first-hand account of living through those times is an essential historical document as well as vital, vivid verse. "I could draw the details from memory," she says of her childhood, and she does, including surprisingly revealing details. Of the dangerous days following the Chernobyl disaster, she recalls that after a "Summer came quickly / with no birds" her mother bought a rare treat of cherries that "glistened on the plate" - the absence of birds having increased the yield of fruit. Explaining "How I earned 10 lei in second grade" by following her music teacher's instruction to keep playing no matter what, she recounts playing her violin in a recital despite a neon ceiling fixture "crashing / with a bang / at my feet." These childhood experiences prepared Serea well to survive many other crashes to come, including the crash of tyrants; and to learn to seek joy in the midst of tragedy. "We never talk about the past," she says of her family, and of a past beset with famine and hunger; but she breaks with that tradition and speaks powerfully of her past, in the process finding her way back to her roots. "The road home belongs / to those who dare"-- Claudia Serea dares to take that road, and to take us along on her journey. "The poems in Claudia Serea's new book, In Those Years, No One Slept, might keep you awake all night. They are beautifully made, haunting, often incantatory, and always searingly honest."--Lloyd Schwartz, author of Who's on First? New and Selected Poems "From the threshold of her American life and with a poetic sensibility unlike any other's, Serea takes stock of a past shaped by the terrors and austerities of authoritarianism to survey the damage, but also to feed the ghosts and salvage beauty from rubble, to resist and testify. Listen in, so we may never again have to count the dead 'like cornmeal and beans,' exhale 'a small cloud' in the murderous cold to prove we are alive, or 'hang on the clotheslines / silhouettes of unborn children.' Both 'prayer pinned to the moon' and dazzling ode to the wound, this is a haunting collection of bold tenderness."--Mihaela Moscaliuc, author of Cemetery Ink "In Claudia Serea's startling new collection, the intersection of life and death is beauty: the eyes of the dead bloom chicory and milkweed, the moon searches for baby teeth in the dark crevices of a thatch roof, and glistening cherries are coveted by a Romanian mother for her children during the birdless summer after Chernobyl. Even the quiet beauty of a young girl reading alone in a shed is touched by impermanence and mortality: she reads 'old books stinking of mice, falling apart.' And yet mortals still spread luminous wings, starlight sprouting on their hands."--Sharon Mesmer, author of Greetings From My Girlie Leisure Place "No one wears the 'shackles' of memory as palpably as Claudia Serea in this lyric testament to the poetry of small survivings in Ceausescu's Romania. The motion of her gaze passes seamlessly across the village, the darned socks, the harrow of years in which everyone 'slept standing,' but what astonishes me most is her refusal of the tragic, her insistence on the life as it was lived--on the scents of sunflower seeds, the dry of red poppies, the language of the landscape speaking despite the fear and silence. To write despite the burying is to write to spite the dictator. Serea's evocations of memory leave no tree's language unheard. She leaves no silence lyre-less."--Alina Stefanescu, author of Dor Poetry. History.

In Those Years, No One Slept

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