Descântec For My Split Tongue, Adriana Oniță’s first book of poetry, gathers English-Romanian poems that travel across generations, homelands, and dreamscapes to ask: what do we lose when we lose a language? Drawn from Oniță’s childhood and her immigration from Jilava to Edmonton, the poems explore dor—a Romanian word for deep longing—for her mother tongue. Along the way, Oniță unpacks “untranslatable” Romanian words and proverbs, each a compressed zip file of culture, humour, grief, and courage. The book itself becomes a descântec—part incantation, part prayer, part spell—summoning both the failures and the triumphs of translation into a ritual of healing.

“Descântec For My Split Tongue is Adriana Oniță’s study of personal inheritance rooted in a ritual of close listening where language is itself evidence of coexistence. Embodied and thoughtful, this multilingual echo along a history of rupture moves with great vulnerability, wrestling from between words those truths that are only found beyond loss. A fresh, artful singing to the necessary human act of remembering, and its lasting promise of connection in a fractured world.”—Canisia Lubrin

“I should have begun by saying / that I lost my mother tongue.” Dor, strigoi, proverbe, descântece: Adriana Oniță’s multilingual Descântec For My Split Tongue holds up a mirror to the untranslatable, and in that mirror, desire, nostalgia, grief, and love weave a homecoming ritual to rediscover what waits within us to be found. These achingly incantatory poems hit to heal where it hurts. “I write of Holy fire”— This dynamo of a debut drives a stake through the heart of the undead to exorcize limba maternă from the unforgotten depths of dor, unsettling that indefinable ache to get as close as words can to the Holy source, the mother of all tongues: “What cannot be quenched. What cannot be burned.”—Tara Skurtu