The Brain Is the Ocean We Live In

Growing up, Cătălina typed her lyrical attempts on her father’s very old typing machine. She would sneak out of the apartment, go into her dad’s office, and type. The papers, which she kept and brought with her from Romania to the States, are so thin, almost translucent. They resemble a dragonfly’s wings and make the author be mindful of the fragility of our bodies and environments. Still, if that gesture was a way to engage with writing without sharing the poems written in Romanian with anyone, later in life the author discovered the healing power of creative writing. The Brain Is the Ocean We Live in is Cătălina’s second volume of poems after she published The Night I Burned My Origami Skin. The poems are almost exclusively written in her adoptive language with traces coming from her mother tongue. Moreover, some of the poems are accompanied by the author’s (recorded) voice, which she finds to be very intimate and soothing, allowing her to be in the room with her readers. Finally, some of the poems have a surprising visual component; the author hopes to let readers who are more visually inclined read and see the poem (or at least one of its possible visual interpretations). Ultimately, Cătălina hopes that the readers would reciprocate her overall playful style, no matter how serious sometimes the topics are: loss, disability, inequity, but also love, community, memories, and so much more.