A Review of Temporary Skin by Romana Iorga (Glass Lyre Press, 2024) – By Vikki C.

Through its arresting imagery and impressive variation, Romana Iorga’s Temporary Skin relays the many intricate ways the human experience is both transient and boundless. Drawing deep on motifs of nature, myth, and memories accessed through ancestral forebearers, we traverse a surreal landscape where reminiscence is as much solace as it is cautionary and arcane. Where a life-sized past meets the speaker’s conscience as fragile dioramas — vivid enclosures, pastoral fragments, and liminalities that provoke and query the body’s limits and encumbrances. Still, we luxuriate in potential as verses unfold a disquiet, where nature’s elements alchemise as extensions of our own physicality. Where touch is at once deft and devastating, emotion is a haunting chorale of voices, and the non-human is both witness and mirror to our flawed convergence.

These poems awaken, seduce and interrogate the spirit, conjuring wonder from ennui, honouring wisdom, desire and loss as kin, blood-tied by the ephemeral. “For centuries now, you’ve kept busy tearing / our garden apart & I have grown wistful / around trees. They seem older somehow / & drop no fruit, except the knowledge of a / world gone up in flames.” The Eden we come to know is more than a beatific vision ascribed through faith alone. It is startlingly familiar, calling us back across terrain both urgent and intimate. We learn to carry love as something tactile and sublime, even “Though close enough our wings barely touch.” Iorga's verses bring rapture and ancient truths to the table, and remain long after the temporal dialogue is over. Arcing beyond the lyric, our hearts fervently heed their tenor, knowing “We have never tasted their full wingspan.”

Temporary Skin is published by Glass Lyre Press and is available on Amazon.