Books
Full Collection: The Amoeba Game, 2017
On a journey that begins in South Florida and ends up in Romania, the country of her family’s forgotten history, Tara Skurtu plays “the amoeba game,” a game that has no rules. With subtle and serious humor, with the vivid spontaneity of memory and dreams, and with surgical precision, these compelling, mysterious poems hold up a lens that reveals the slippery and changing dimensions of our many selves.
Boston Globe, Nina MacLaughlin:The Amoeba Game deposits us on the southern tip of Florida, in prison visiting rooms, on Romanian side streets and markets; we come to know a father who invents shapes and cracks wise to cops, a troubled sister, poet pals, and loves. Her imagery, of the simple and familiar, sears itself on the mind: a fly is caught in a trap, “its body puttied/ to the glue strip, legs waving/ like six wet strokes of black ink.” Skurtu’s poems — wise, wry, probing — grapple with God and language, with the strange futures that unfold for us all.
Robert Pinsky:The earned, liberated laughter of survival and foreboding; a high-voltage mind thinking in images; candid grief; an irreverence that rises above convention to a true, untamed intuition of the sacred; love, with all its penalties and joys. With these qualities, the engaging poems of Tara Skurtu’s The Amoeba Game offer a vision of our familiar world transformed by possibility. The title poem is a compact, funny parable of imagination engaging the unknown, and happy to encounter the unknowable.
Gail Mazur:“There’s a town in Romania/where almost everyone is a Skurtu…,” the poet Tara Skurtu hears from her father when she’s a girl in Florida thinking about aisles of zippers at Jo-Ann Fabric. Skurtu journeys into adulthood from there, her childhood state of Bible School and barracudas and a loving family’s disarray, to the dream and reality of life—and love—in Romania. In these wise, sharply observed, dazzling lyric poems, we travel, too, as she opens to—and is opened by—her ancestral adopted country.
Jill McDonough: In The Amoeba Game, Tara Skurtu demonstrates broad, empathetic range, moving between remembering a childhood game while frying an egg to visiting her sister in jail, prayer, Ellis Island, a pink dildo defacing a statue of the Virgin Mary, boogers on a White House wall, a “cross-eyed skull” tattoo, vacation Bible school, and “your neighbor Marlene,/ her neon lips, twenty-something/feral cats, her Buick, its red and white/bumper sticker: Shit happens.” All are made real, present, with admirable, clear-eyed precision. Whether she’s talking about “[t]he fear of forgetting I am well” or wanting you so much she “walked into your morning shower fully clothed,” Tara Skurtu shows you what she means, and that she means it.
Reviews
The Boston Globe, Nina MacLaughlin
Salamander, Jacqueline Kolosov
Joyce Peseroff
4squarereview, Valerie Duff-Strautmann
Cider Press Review, Donna Vorreyer
bookblog, Alice Teodorescu
tweetspeak, Glynn Young
Neil McCarthy's Blog, Neil McCarthy
Evilcyclist's Blog
Twitter Live Review, G.M. Palmer
The Stuff of Poetry: My First Good Cry of 2018, Paul Thomas
Interviews & Features
The Rumpus
Crevice
Bookblog
Memorious
Fusion: Global Art, Words, & Music, Judson Evans
WBUR's The ARTery, Our 5 Favorite Poetry Books This Year
Chapbook: Skurtu, Romania, 2016
In Skurtu, Romania, the poet lands physically and emotionally in the country of her family’s forgotten history, and she familiarizes herself in this foreign place through the dynamic of an alienating love story. Tara Skurtu’s poems have the logic of memory, the vivid spontaneity of dreams, and the precision of calculus—each line is, in a sense, an asymptote continually approaching the limits of language and love. This poetry holds a lens over every moment, alters the perception of home, invites the reader in as both foreigner and guest.
Lloyd Schwartz:
Tara Skurtu’s poems don’t rely on the usual “poetic” subject matter. Instead, as in these remarkable poems set in Romania, the country of her ancestors, she can take an unlikely or even grim situation and, in a sensitively detailed, amused, and finally deeply sympathetic narrative, convey an emotionally complex experience and invite us to live it along with her. She once wrote that “if a poem does nothing more than make you feel something which can’t be explained, it’s done its job.” These mysterious, mesmerizing, and compelling poems have done much more than their job.