“No words can do justice to the resonance of Vancu’s poems. Upon first encountering him in Romanian, I was torn between a desperate desire to translate him, to bring the particular sounds and figurations of his lyre into English, and the humility known as speechlessness. Like ancient Latin poets, Vancu seeks to locate the absent through sound, first-person address, and intimate evocation, the goal being nothing less than ‘to understand literature as resurrection of the dead,’ as he puts it. Terms of endearment structure The Rope in Bloom (as elegantly translated by Paula and Cyrus Console-Șoican), reminding us that the you is always there for the Other. Poetry’s work demands nothing less than eternity, and no poet has committed their lifework to this as consistently and lyrically as has Vancu.”

Alina Stefanescu, author of My "Heresies"

 “Cyrus and Paula Console-Șoican have rendered Vancu’s extraordinary 2012 volume into literary English of great emotional immediacy and conceptual resonance. Vancu’s meditative vignettes of contemporary family and literary life draw readers into a precarious intimacy with the speaker, while, in lyric poems, his sense of the mundane self is continuously thrown into crisis by nightly dreams of his father, who speaks to him from the world of the dead through formal three-line stanzas that invoke Dante’s Inferno.”

Srikanth Reddy, Phoenix Poets series editor and author of "Underworld Lit"

“Vancu’s extended meditation on death, tragedy, family, and poetry alternates lyric and prose sections that ferry the reader between the domestic and dream worlds. In one, we find the poet who writes the book and lives with his wife and young son, and in the other, we peer into the underworld of the poet’s father, who died by suicide. The Rope in Bloom grapples with grief and tragic inheritances, while disturbing and delighting with its particular strain of dark humor.”

Rosa Alcalá, Phoenix Poets consulting editor and author of "YOU"