Nicolae Coande

“I consider myself merely a poet-reader on the tracks of other poets”, says Romanian writer Nicolae Coande, citing Roberto Bolano: “… in order to find a poet you need the help of another poet”. And, Coande continues, in a statement to the Viennese Q21 artist-in-residence program, “the help of a reader, […] with sympathy for these people, men and women, for whom poetry is indeed what H.M. Enzensberger once called 'the only form of literature which is preserved in the mind, today as thousands of years ago’”.


The author of nine books of poems and four collections of essays, Coande’s work has been included in the anthologies Gefährliche Serpentinen – Rumänische Lyrik der Gegenwart (Druckhaus Verlag, Berlin, 1998); Of Gentle Wolves (Calypso Editions, New York, 2011); and The Vanishing Point that Whistles (Talisman Press, USA, 2011).