Deep Fakes

The poems of celebrated Romanian poete maudit Dan Sociu inhabit the margins of modern life, where personal confession meets social critique and irony deepens emotional truth. Sociu captures the melancholy of post-transition Romania in poems that are both autobiographical-influenced by his own experiences with homelessness, illness, and poverty-and collective. A poet of emotional precision, Sociu chronicles disillusionment, love, death, and survival with minimalist clarity and subdued lyricism. Here, the body dwells in abjection and vulnerability, yet fleeting moments of transcendence emerge through insight, tenderness, and ironic reflection. Deep Fakes, the first representative volume of his poetry to be published in English, spans more than a decade of Sociu's work, from his Naive and Sentimental Poems of 2012 to the 2025 volume Sweet and Cheap.