Vagabond poet Dimitrie Stelaru was born in 1917 as Dumitru Petrescu in Romania’s border region with Bulgaria. He never knew his biological father, who was killed in action during World War I, and developed such a bad relationship with his stepfather that he was sent to a strict Christian boarding school in Transylvania at the age of fourteen. Stelaru escaped the institute’s austere regime a couple of years later and vanished into the fringe of…
Constant Tonegaru was born into a middle-class family from Galați, Romania in 1919. His father was a ship captain, who took his son on voyages to Greece, Turkey and Egypt and instilled him with a passion for poetry. After having finished primary school in Brăila, Tonegaru moved to Bucharest where he finished his secondary education and was trained as a journalist. His first articles were…
Sea Urchin’s Văz compiles nine watercolour portraits of people who were born with a caul (part of the amniotic sac wrapped around the baby’s head). In folklore around the world the rarely occurring cauls were considered omens of good fortune. ‘Caul bearers’ were also thought to possess supernatural powers and the ability to see ‘beyond the veil’, between this world and others…
Pie marks Sea Urchin’s 25th anniversary. The slim compilation of 10 prose and poetry pieces offers a taste of Sea Urchin’s publications since 2000, when the press was launched as an artist’s project on the historical avant-garde and its 19th-century predecessors. With: Henri Michaux, Edgar Allan Poe, Georg Trakl, Urmuz, Johannes Baader and more…