Limbinal, as its hybrid title suggests, speaks in the porous space between a limb’s articulations and a liminal border. Formally diverse, the pieces in Limbinal intersect prose fragments with incantatory dialogues, poetic footnotes with photographic phrases, rebellious translations with liquid transpositions.

Against a backdrop of globalization fantasies heralding the new utopia, the fallout of nationalistic impulses, conflicts repeatedly arising out of rigid entrenchment, and the increasingly hazy distinction between public and private, voices struggle to cross, to intersect, to overlap. It is the permeable spaces arising between these voices that matter. Here, linguistic limbs fold and migrate, a distant border politicks and trips over the horizon, a river overflows, floods, palimpsests another river, Arendt’s responsibility touches Deleuze’s fold, the body, changeable, restless, searches for resonances.

New translations of Paul Celan’s Romanian poems become a generative field of language that sprout other limbs and broach other thresholds. A voice intimately addresses the border while multilingual subjectivities tackle radical responses. So the mouth, possibly hungering, possibly melodic, is always present, ready to disarticulate in order to articulate before the city gates, wobbly with struggle.

Oana Avasilichioaei's previous translations include Universal Bureau of Copyrights by Bertrand Laverdure, Wigrum by Quebecois writer Daniel Canty (2013), The Islands by Quebecoise poet Louise Cotnoir (2011) and Occupational Sickness by Romanian poet Nichita Stanescu (2006). In 2013, she edited a feature on Quebec French writing in translation for Aufgabe (New York). she has also played in the bounds of translation and creation in a poetic collaboration with Erín Moure, Expeditions of a Chimæra, (2009). Her most recent poetry collection is We, Beasts (2012; winner of the QWF's A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry), and her audio work can be found on Pennsound. She lives in Montreal. Learn more about Avasilichioaei at www.oanalab.com.
Ingrid Pam Dick (aka Gregoire Pam Dick, Mina Pam Dick, Jake Pam Dick et al.) is the author of Metaphysical Licks (BookThug 2014) and Delinquent (Futurepoem, 2009). Her writing has appeared in BOMB, frieze, The Brooklyn Rail, Aufgabe, EOAGH, Fence, Matrix, Open Letter, Poetry Is Dead, and elsewhere, and has been featured in Postmodern Culture; it is included in the anthologies The Sonnets (ed. S. Cohen and P. Legault, Telephone, 2012) and Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, (ed. TC Tolbert and Tim Trace Peterson, Nightboat, 2013). Her philosophical work has appeared in a collection published by the International Wittgenstein Symposium. Also an artist and translator, Dick lives in New York City, where she is currently doing work that makes out and off with Büchner, Wedekind, Walser, and Michaux.

Oana Avasilichioaei's profile page

“I want to type in every line, every sentence, but I resist…just buy the book …Limbinal is full of wonder, of questions, of beautiful language and imagery. It’s more than I can possibly know or write about. Which is the best kind of book there is.”
– Amanda Earl, amandaearl.blogspot.ca

“Limbinal tenaciously delineates and explores the zone(s) encountered when the poetic imagination meets the materiality of its practice. The writing is boundary walking, blindfolded, and traumatized that ‘this is the moment to speak.’ And the place to speak. The site of Avasilichioaei’s moment buzzes with the anxiety of political, historical, linguistic, and textual boundaries. The contact zone in these exquisite poems is the site of interrogation, a tension between words and mouth, spectacle and spectator, photo and text, invention and translation. Limbinal goes out on a limb and refuses to perform an easy answer.”
– Fred Wah

“… two books in one, with a portfolio of colour photographs in the middle. The Romanian-born Montreal poet has an instinctive interest in boundaries. … It is heavily theorized and works brilliantly with formatting and fonts, but remains curiously detached, even in the love poems. The photographs that both join and divide the book illustrate the concepts more powerfully than the poems of the first part. … It takes courage to juxtapose one’s own writing with such giants [as Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs]. She carries it off honourably.”
– Montreal Review of Books

“Avasilichioaei is an experimentalist … [her] work is sophisticated, challenging, and transgressive, yet well worth the effort.”
– Elena Wolff