Angel Riding a Beast

The poems in Angel Riding a Beast are the stunning expression of the Romanian poet Liliana Ursu's years in America. The sadness and paradoxes of exile and the clarity of a cross-cultural awareness become for Ursu the psychological and descriptive framework for poems infused with the emotion and images of erotic longing and spiritual loneliness

"Her best [poems] pay tribute to Ovid and Ezra Pound, whose fractured lyricism she often echoes in poems about her native land, upon which her reputation will develop." --Kirkus Reviews

"Ursu seeks to make concrete such abstract concepts as home, exile, love, hope . . . she bridges the gulf between the practical and the theoretical or between what is and what could be."--World Literature Today

"The sympathetic humanity of her cultural observations and the physicality of her poetic images give Ursu's poetry an affecting and universal perspective in which disparate experiences and places coalesce in a singular human landscape." --Translation Review "Carnivorous and tender, majestic and human" --Tess Gallagher