a woman made entirely of air
dancing girl press, 2025
“The poems of Romana Iorga’s searching, piercing a woman made entirely of air tremble between speech and silence, inhabiting a liminal space entirely their own: aching, tender, and true. No word is wasted in their effort to make present on the page a daughter’s complicated grief. And to the vital, insistent question of how to speak, how to live, when “silence / keeps the truth / whole,” these poems are their own vital and beautiful answer, pressing back against the beyond-words-ness they both honor and refuse.”
— Kasey Jueds, Author of Keeper and The Thicket
“In Romana Iorga’s a woman made entirely of air, a daughter mourns a mother with a grief that is as complex and oppositional as the relationship between silence and speech. Juxtaposing language’s ability to harm, memorialize, and transform with its mirror-image helplessness in the face of death, Iorga’s work is uncompromising and generous at once, moving and subtle.”
— Maureen Thorson, Author of On Dreams, Share the Wealth, My Resignation, and Apples to Oranges
“In this rivetingly poignant collection, a woman made entirely of air, Romana Iorga asks, “what / am i / if not / a boat made of flesh / carrying words from one / shore of your absence / to another?” Iorga’s delicate poems, intricately interwoven with caesuras, create a beautiful lacework of memory, trauma, and grief. These poems are a meditation on breath, breathlessness, silence, silencing, absence, and erasure. Here, Iorga seamlessly moves within the transitory, the hospice between shores, the Bardo of the in-between. These are hauntingly exquisite poems.”
— Lee Ann Roripaugh, Author of tsunami vs. the fukushima 50
Romana Iorga 