"'There’s a town in Romania/where almost everyone is a Skurtu…,' the poet Tara Skurtu hears from her father when she’s a girl in Florida thinking about aisles of zippers at Jo-Ann Fabric. Skurtu journeys into adulthood from there, her childhood state of Bible School and barracudas and a loving family’s disarray, to the dream and reality of life—and love—in Romania. In these wise, sharply observed, dazzling lyric poems, we travel, too, as she opens to—and is opened by—her ancestral adopted country." — Gail Mazur
On a journey that begins in South Florida and ends up in Romania, the country of her family's forgotten history, Tara Skurtu plays "the amoeba game," a game that has no rules. With subtle and serious humor, with the vivid spontaneity of memory and dreams, and with surgical precision, these compelling, mysterious poems hold up a lens that reveals the slippery and changing dimensions of our many selves.
Tara Skurtu is a two-time Fulbright grantee and recipient of two Academy of American Poets prizes and a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in magazines such as Salmagundi, the Kenyon Review, Plume, and Poetry Review. She is the author of the chapbook Skurtu, Romania and the full poetry collection The Amoeba Game. She currently teaches creative writing in Bucharest.
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