The results of our Close Approximations contest winners are in! Find the official citations as well as links to the winning entries here. For the next two months, we will spotlight these contest winners as well as their work. First up, we present an excerpt of the top entry in the poetry category. Judge Sawako Nakayasu says: “I’m thrilled to have selected this year’s winner for poetry: ‘wrong connections’ by Andra Rotaru, in Anca Roncea’s excellent translation from the Romanian. I love how this work reads like a film that can only take place in the mind of the reader. The scenes (I read them like scenes) carry you through a changing landscape that can be menacing, historical, scientific, or downright violent— all in torqued connection with each other like the ‘incorrect connections’ of the tribar.”
“In the British Journal of Psychology R. Penrose published the impossible ‘tribar.’” Penrose called it a three-dimensional rectangular structure. But it is certainly not the projection of an intact spatial structure. The ‘impossible tribar’ holds together as a drawing purely and simply by means of incorrect connections between quite normal elements. The three right angles are completely normal, but they have been joined together in a false, spatially impossible way.”
—Bruno Ernst, The Magic Mirror of M. C. Escher
she sits on a tuft of grass: drying under her. even her clothes dry on her. make some wishes when throwing something in the water. rust solders iron under water, no one passes, sounds of bursts of water.
membranes in every organ break the ones close. packs of wild creatures break the dawn. the smell of dry skin and water tossing.
water thumping. they stretch out their claws and grab organisms leaping out. mill blades turn. the axis spreads the motion. the constant supply in the upper part of the mill. below flour and bran.
kinetic air, mechanical air. the energy of an old woman at the edge of water.
crack. when hair hits hair
In the 1875 photograph, the woman had a stroller next to her. In it, a little girl held a wooden horse. Its mane of 3.172 coarse hairs. Every time the saddle rocked, a hair cracked.
The photograph was taken when the mane was certain to calm down the infant. Otherwise the little girl would suck on her nails until crack. They’d form a ditch rising in the middle and the corneous formation would remain so forever. Her fingers would end in ingrown claws, unnecessary deformities.
gnash. when dentine gives
When her first teeth came out, her mother soothed her gums with alcohol-infused cotton balls. The child let out a shrill cry, her gums swelled, and the redness from the alcohol resembled necrosis. When she put ice in a gauze pouch on the outer cheek, the pain became bearable. A twinge went across her body. She clenched her teeth so hard, the pressure of the upper teeth on the lower escaped in a snap, the imminent corrosion of enamel.
blink. the unpredictability of a figure turned asymmetrical
the axis on which 2 eyes can seem symmetrical either close up or far away is perturbed. When palms clap, out of fear the little girl closes her eyelids. It happens so fast, not even dolls with plastic eyes can imitate her. She often presses her eyelids until they become purple. Someone’s mere gaze becomes painful, causes her spasms. These muscles pulled at from every side make the eyes twitch a few seconds.
gnaw. a child’s fingers
soft pink tissue macerated inside the mouth. Lips stick to the bony surface of the phalanges, she savors the tough protein material, the appendix of the skin. Ke-ra-tin.
What does the root grow out of?
after the nail grows, the finger is coated, the external edge of the nail is dead, white. “human nails have been preserved from ancestors, they used them for defense.”
the little girl gnaws loudly. she doesn’t know it’s a sign of aggression. she can’t defend herself, so she defuses her weapons.
Translated from the Romanian by Anca Roncea
*****
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Andra Rotaru is a poet and the founder of the multimedial and multilingual journal Crevice. The intersection of arts has always been one of her major interests: she has initiated collaborations at the intersection of poetry and choreography (the dance performance Lemur, presented in the US and across Europe by the choreographer Robert Tyree); poetry, fiction, and video (the documentary All Together, made during the International Writing Program 2014 with the poet Raj Chakrapani); and photography (Photo-letter pairing, involving the Iowa community and IWP writers). She is the author of Într-un pat sub cearșaful alb (In a Bed Under the White Sheet, 2005); En una cama bajo la sábana blanca (the Spanish translation of her debut volume, 2008); Ținuturile sudului (Southern Lands, 2010); and Lemur (2012). Rotaru was awarded The Best Young Poet of Year Award at The Writers’ Gala in Bucharest (2013) for Lemur. It will be published in English translation this autumn by Action Books.
Anca Roncea is a poet and translator. She is a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is currently attending the University of Iowa’s M.F.A. program in literary translation. In 2012–2013 she was a Fulbright visiting scholar at UC Berkeley. She was born and raised in Romania and now lives in Iowa City where she writes and translates poems, working on translations of Romanian poetry, an experimental translation of Tristan Tzara, as well as her first book of poetry. She explores the space where language can create pivots in the midst of displacement while incorporating the aesthetics of Constantin Brancusi. She is the 2017 winner of the Omnidawn Single Poem Broadside Contest. Her work can be found in Omniverse, Berkeley Poetry Review, Beecher’s Magazine, and the Des Moines Register.