Simona Popescu, one of the most important contemporary writers in Romania and a university professor at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Bucharest is preparing a new poetry book, which will be published this year.

The new title comes after 'Cartea plantelor si animalelor' [The Book of Plants and Animals], published in 2021 and republished in 2023, which has been awarded the most important literary prizes in Romania. The book also received praiseful reviews from the most important literary critics in Romania.

In an interview with AGERPRES, Simona Popescu tells us more about how she wrote this very valuable literary work and quite voluminous - the book has 320 pages, which is unusual for a book of poetry - and reveals what other plans she has for the future.

AGERPRES: How is it to publish a book of poetry of this amplitude, I would even call it 'monumental', in today's Romania? And I mean, of course, 'Cartea plantelor si animalelor' [The Book of Plants and Animals], published 15 years after your previous book, 'Lucrari in verde sau pledoaria mea pentru poezie' [Works in Green or My Defence of Poetry]?

Simona Popescu: I wouldn't use the world 'monumental.' The book is actually quite opposed to the idea of 'monumental,' since it is about fragility, the fluid vitality, and vulnerability. Although, in a different line of thought, yes, it's true that it's a rather difficult book - in every sense -, despite its apparent simplicity. There are, for sure, some pages that even children can understand, but there are others that are rather hermetic. Not to mention the fact that there are a lot of names of plants and animals that are difficult to visualize and, therefore, readers who are not that much into nature - which is vast and semi-unknown - might perceive them some kind of abstract things. Although, from a different angle, one doesn't need to know what are the exact flowers or animals I mention in the book, since this is not just a book about nature, and I know that the readers get that, they understand 'subtext' and they are empathic.

The truth is that I was taken aback by the success of the book, as much as a book of poetry can be considered successful. For many years, as a gardener, groundskeeper, florist, arboriculturist etc., I kept throwing seeds... of thought, and images (as the poet put it) randomly, and after a while they bloomed, they grew, they spread. I brought 'plants,' with all their beauty, from philosophy, from others' pages, from Pliny the Elder to Emily Dickinson, I have extended 'the garden, the park, the field,' and I enjoyed doing it among or in parallel with other things, while I was writing other texts, which one day will become prose or poetry or essay books.

There is a word for everything that I collected here in this book, from different times and space, it belongs to Michel Foucault and is: 'heterotopia'. And let me also say that, since you mentioned 'Lucrari in verde sau pledoaria mea pentru poezie' [Works in Green or My Defence of Poetry], published in 2006, that I wrote my first texts about plants and animals much earlier, ten years before the 'Works in Green ...', actually, which also has around 300 pages, being about poets and poetry, readers, and not only about the hypocrite ones, but also about brothers, to quote Baudelaire, and I will add sisters and other relatives 'in mind and thought.'

AGERPRES: How did you start writing this book?

Simona Popescu: I had this desire to write a book about poets and benthic deep sea beings, and that's how I started to write this book that will be later called 'Cartea plantelor si animalelor' [The Book of Plants and Animals]. I found a connection between the two, which has to do with ... deepness, with the strange luminosity that sometimes appears, like scintillations, in the deep darkness of indistinguishableness.

I remember that, in 1998, I had to answer a question in an interview with my former students, Paul Cernat and Bogdan Ciubuc, and I said that: 'If I really want something, then it's enough to wear a diver suit and go there where the fish swarm, among the calcareous embroidery of the coral reefs. These deep sea creatures living in such great darkness, take my breath away. And what is even more amazing, beyond any science-fiction imagination, is that all these jelly-like creatures produce some kind of luminous structures through which they communicate which each other in a lot of different ways, while they are always changing configuration. You can imagine the madness, the noise ... of lights they must have there, in their world!

I believe that writers are very much like these animals. While they speak of themselves, the writers create, with their own bodies, with their senses, with their psychic, their voices, all kinds of luminous configurations with a variable geometry, while hoping, of course, that there is someone out there who will receive their message correctly. Words do not matter that much or, at least, they do not count the most, sometimes they are just a diversion. And beyond them there are, or there aren't, the hallucinatory and polyglot structures. And this is how I wrote three books, actually, quite naturally, almost without realizing I was about to say (!): 'Lucrari in verde sau pledoaria mea pentru poezie' [Works in Green or My Defence of Poetry], which is about poetry and poets, 'Cartea plantelor si animalelor' [The Book of Plants and Animals] and the one that I am about to publish this year at the Cartier publishing house, which is, again, a massive book of poetry... I won't describe it, it would be complicated, but it will be available soon to see, to read.

So, again, I wrote the book that I've published in 2021 not in 15 years but in even more years! Because this is how I work, on several construction sites simultaneously. And then I try to finish each one at a time. This time it was the ... plants and animals turn.

AGERPRES: What were your expectations after publishing 'Cartea plantelor si animalelor' [The Book of Plants and Animals]?

Simona Popescu: My expectations? Well, first of all I should say that it was like I had my debut all over again. A new generation of writers emerged in those 15 years and I thought that those who know me and those who don't know me enough and those who only read 'Exuvii' would be confused. I also thought that maybe some of the writers from the new generation, who did not read 'Lucrari in verde' or 'Juventus' might think that I am that kind of poet who writers 'about nature.' It sounds bad, in the context in which the amazing nature basically became boring over time, because of the numerous clichés they teach you in school in relation to it. However, I was lucky enough to publish my book in a time when nature returned as a theme, only that it was called 'ecopoetry' - although I wouldn't say that this is what I am doing here, ecopoetry. I am interested in ecopoetry, but in other ways. At the same time, by chance, my first three books - 'Xilofonul si alte poeme' [The Xylophone and Other Poems], 'Juventus' and 'Noapte sau zi' [Night or Day] - were also republished in 2021, by the Rocart publishing house, in one volume, which means that they were published in the same year that I published 'Cartea plantelor si animalelor' [The Book of Plants and Animals]. And that was a good thing, I believe.

Leaving aside 'the expectations', however, while I was writing this book, during all those years, I felt something I imagine the gardener must feel when he is minding his own business, or the ocean diver or sea diver, I felt like I was far away from the daily tumult. And I was glad to see that others liked it too. The same as the gardener feels joy when people passing by do not remain indifferent to his/her flowers. Or the same as the oceanographer feels joy when people show interest in the little coelenterate that he/she admires and studies, the turritopsis dohrnii, the so-called immortal jellyfish. And I am also glad to see that the attentive readers, those who pay attention to 'the poetic species,' understood what I did in this book. But I will say more about these 'species' in my next book that I promised to give to the Cartier publishing house.

AGERPRES: You said at one point that the first memory you have from childhood is of you getting lost in the garden. Is there a connection maybe between this memory and 'The Book of Plants and Animals'? And I am thinking now of the fact that the biographic self seems to have faded away here compared to your other books, and also about the fact that it took you so long to publish this book.

Simona Popescu: I included that memory in my novel 'Exuvii' [Exuviae], my only novel so far, which I call novel and then add the word Mircea Nedelciu used to described it when the book was launched, back in 1997: 'unclassifiable.' Also, I do intend to publish two more books like that, which lack the indispensable - for others - storyline.

'Exuvii' is an autobiographical book that focuses the first age, childhood. However, it is not a childhood memories book, there are no events, no stories, no facts, no characters. And the 'main character' doesn't even have a name. Actually, there are two characters in one: the child and the writer. This is the writer's book, even if the one that you can see in the frame is the child, while the writer stays hidden. The child sees and feels enormous and she writes about that, she writes about the poetic perception, in a broad sense, after all. And we all have this poetic perception in our childhood, although some of us forget all about it later.

'Cartea plantelor si animalelor' [The Book of Plants and Animals] is, indeed, connected to 'Exuvii' [Exuviae], through many bridges. All of my books are connected, actually, the ones I wrote in the past and the ones I will write in the future, in which I referred to, or I will refer to, multiple identities, time, memory and the feeling of alienation, friendship and youth etc. The child is innocent and strong in his fragility; he/she absorbs the surrounding world and gets absorbed by it. In adolescence we want to learn, we feel that hunger for knowledge - exhaustive and intense - which continues to grow. I think of myself as a junction or overlapping of these two postures.

And when it comes to the biographical self becoming fade ... I felt that more than once. I even remember how, when I was about 28 years old, I met a women writer that was older than me, on the street. She was very active at the time, very much present, before leaving the country later causing me to lose track of her. She looked at me like he saw a ghost and asked: 'What is happening to you? You faded!' I remember the word because it shocked me, it made feel like a ghost all of a sudden. I told her: 'Yes, Mrs., I did fade, I am writing a book! I had just started 'Exuvii', a book I completed in seven years. I was staying inside building my own world. I could even say that fading is part of the metabolism of my writing.

I did prefer, in general, to stay aside and away from the stage lights. I voluntarily faded! More than that, I am among the few authors in Romania who refuses to register with the social networks, although there were many who told me that I am making a mistake, because the 'game', 'be damned,' as Arghezi used to say, moved there! But I do think that there must also be people who stay away from that networks. So I mind my own business. I don't feel isolated, at all, I have my smart friends and I am surrounded by my students, who give me energy and enthusiasm for the beautiful things and for what really matters to us.

AGERPRES: Your poetry's voice seems unchanged, despite all those years that passed, until 'Cartea plantelor si animalelor' [The Book of Plants and Animals]. It's the same playful and provocative, melancholic and rebellious voice, while the biographical self withdrew, as I said before, it almost vanished. Is this the magical solution that Simona Popescu found in order to be able to write non-ironically about her own maturity or in order to stick to these lines: 'what I used to be/I will always be'?

Simona Popescu: My biographical self did not vanish. It is just putting on a disguise! It is somewhere in the 'garden' or in the 'ocean', in 'the water groups,' where a 'second game, more pure' takes place [S.P. quotes poet Ion Barbu here - editor's note].

All my books are autobiographical and all of them are defined by some type of detachment, with a nuance of ... impersonalism. However, I will have to leave for another occasion the discussion about the versatile meaning of these words: 'biographic' and 'impersonal,' and how their meaning shifts depending on the context. It would be too much to discuss it now, there are too many things to clarify. I will just say that I even included a dictionary with alternative meanings to the usual ones in one of the two prose books I have in my 'drawers' - and by drawers I mean folders in my laptop!

Even 'Juventus' begins with a sequence that bears the title 'I Actually Want to Write About You When I Write About Me.' It is a book about young age in general more than it is a book about my experiences as a young girl. And 'Lucrari în verde...' [Works in green ...] is about poets and poetry, with many characters. And among all these characters there are three that represent me: Profy, Scry and, especially, Sy, an 'impersonal' entity that was inherited from the child in 'Exuvii.'

In my PhD thesis, which I published 12 years ago with the title 'The Author, a Character' I write in detail about all these things you are asking me about and that interest me as a writer.

'What I used to be /I will always be'', yes!, in various percentages, in different identity equations, with all that it entails. Irony has diminished, self-irony, the satire, rebellion - and I regret it, in a way. They were related not only to my teenage years, to my youth, which is always rebellious, but also to the fact that those years found me in a miserable and oppressive dictatorship. And there is a lot to be said about this topic too. And then there was the rebellion from 'Lucrari în verde...' [Green Works...], a bitter one. Poetry is less visited and unfrequentable, at the same time, and what I wanted to do, in my own way, was to raise interest in the poetic perception, to raise interest in poetry, which also exists in reality, in our life, of each one of us, not only in the books. I wanted to do this for my students, it was for them whom I actually wrote those 300 pages, 'the plea.' They told me that I did succeed!

I could see that, in time, there were rather my childhood features that remained and stick out: I was a thoughtful, melancholic, dreaming, lonely, shy girl, intoxicated with the beauty of the world and disturbed by everything that came from the evil side, the ugly side. In my youth, in the 80s-90s-00s, the irony, and including a type o aggressiveness - and by this I refer to everything that I admired, while I was a student, in the avant-garde poets whom I discovered in amazement, for we did not study them in school. There were, in poetry, such forms of reactions to the surrounding mediocrity, lies, including in literature, senility, phoniness, as Salinger's characters Holden and Phoebe would put in, to all that communist system that it was not just about Ceausescu and his entourage. You were not allowed to be radical, you couldn't nt publish if you didn't behave. I and didn't! And I was also scared of maturity, if this meant what I was able to see around me. Also, I was especially afraid of old age, that's what I feared the most.

However, things did change, in time. Maturity is not phoniness, unless you become self-sufficient. On the contrary, maturity means complexity, intensity, knowledge, while the old age, as I now like to believe, means understanding, maybe serenity, as they say. Only that I do not see these as separated ages, but rather as concentric circles of the same 'trunk,' of the same entity: all in one! The child, the young girl that I was are not just lost in the past! I didn't write 'Exuvii' for nothing. So let's see how all these 'alliances' are created, and let's see how we transfer this inner dialogue on the page.
'What I used to be I will always be'... I wouldn't continue this line as I did in 'Juventus' if I was to do it now. I don't know, perhaps I would only keep, without the irony, 'Cumintenia pamantului' [The Wisdom of the Earth].

AGERPRES: You were involved last year in a project dedicated to Grupul de la Brasov [The Brasov School], the literary group you were part of very early in your career as a writer, in the 80s, alongside Andrei Bodiu, Marius Oprea, Carius Dobrescu. What was the project about?

Simona Popescu: There was someone who brought us together, Marius, Carius and me and, of course, Andrei, who is always by our side, even if he died in 2014 and moved to that world they say it's better than this one. That someone is Cristian Cosma, publisher and writer, and an admirer of our group, as I found out on that occasion. He published some newspapers that were dedicated to each of us, which included interviews, pictures, fragments from our works. He also shoot a first sequence from a documentary film about our literary group that was called Grupul de la Brasov.

He even took part in some of the encounters that we had with high schoolers and students in Brasov and Timisoara. Actually, I believe that what he did is close to what a literary agent is supposed to do. He was our literary agent for a couple of months. And it wasn't bad, not at all! Even if there was just me and Caius who went to these encounters, two out of for, in the context in which Marius is living outside Romania, in Greece, now. However, I did write about this story of ours, the story of Grupul de la Brasov, in a novel that I hope to be able to send to the Polirom publishing house soon.

AGERPRES: How did the young you interacted and received the story of your literary group, considering that they do not know much about the context back then when you started?

Simona Popescu: I am not sure what they were thinking, the young boys and girls we had in front of us. For my part, I always feel good when I meet young people who are interested in literature and I always try to take the teenager that I was, and, in a way, I still am, as my ally, on such occasions. I also have my students at the faculty, and I can say that I do not feel that we are that different, after all. We listen to the same music, we also share, more or less, the same taste in literature, the world literature of the Romanian one, and we are on the same part of the barricade in political and social terms, as far as I could see. We sometimes meet by chance at the street protests, as we did last time, after the first round of the presidential election in Romania, when we got pretty scared. I also have my creative writing courses that force me to stay in touch with everything that is new - although I have always been interested in everything that it is interesting in the world - and I also founded a magazine together with my students, which focuses social and cultural matters.

AGERPRES: You also published last year a collection of Andrei Bodiu's poetry, 'Opera poetica' [Andrei Bodiu. The Poetry Collection], what can you share with us about this project?

Simona Popescu: I really miss Andrei and I believe that he is missed in our literary world, in general. He was honest, firm in his opinions, very generous with the young people, and he always had sympathy for the valuable people. How did I get involved in this project of a collection of his poetry that was published by Rocart? Well, I did publish there, in 2021, a first book, of my own, as I said before. And I was in talks to publish this collection of Andrei's poetry ever since it was supposed to be published by Cartea Romaneasca publishing house, a while ago. However, I delayed the project, then I forgot about it, and only later I decided that a new generation of readers, poets emerged, and that those who are interested in reading my poetry can't find my first books anywhere. So I finally accepted the invitation to republish my poetry, and at the same time I proposed to my friend and publisher Calin Vlasie to also publish a collection of Andrei's poetry.

In 2022 I was supposed to publish my second volume. I was supposed to republished 'Lucrari în verde...' [Green Works...], to be more precise, but I don't know what's got into me and I promised myself that I would take care of Andrei's book first. I thought it would be easy. The two books, his and mine, I thought, could be published in the same year, 2022, but it wasn't that easy, in the end. When I started to write about Andrei, I realized how difficult was to find what others wrote about him. I couldn't find anything! So it took me a lot of time to search for materials, to talk to friends, other people I knew, and it was like trying to find a needle in the haystack. Andrei left nothing behind, not even one single review about one of his book, somehwre in a file, in a drawer; he did not keep anything, there was no such archive whatsoever. Or maybe it was lost. I only found out from his wife, Adriana, that his laptop was sent to the repair shop not long before he died. And it couldn't be recovered. Maybe he had something there, maybe he had a folder with links or reference to articles about him. However, I almost gave up in 2022. I thought that I had no chance of putting this volume together in the way that I wanted to do it. Because I couldn't believe that there was so little material written about him, it was impossible. However, one day I was returning home by train, and I was sitting in my wagon reading, lost in thought. The train stopped between stations, and when I raised my eyes I saw the name of the locality: APATA. Andrei used to be a teacher there. He even had a cycle of poems called 'Poemele de la Apata' [The Poems from Apata]. And that was the moment when I resumed my work and I felt more confident and everything went on very well. I also found texts written about his work, many of them, very good ones, everything went smooth, as they say. Without me taking long breaks, without me feeling discouraged.

It did take me a couple of days, however, to write the preface. My intention was to be a preface that reached beyond Andrei Bodiu's poetry. For I believe that every author needs to be regarded in several different contexts: he/she needs to be regarded first in the context of his debut, then in the context in which he/she developed, while we also need to look into the shifts in his work, in his literature, in the manner in which he literature was read, considering at the same time the whole literary context. Andrei wrote a novel, he wrote books about other authors, literary reviews, a travel diary. And I also wrote about the beginning of Grupul de la Brasov - we were some high schoolers who believed in literature as a form of total freedom, about what happened in the Romanian poetry in the 80s, 90s, 002, about biographical poetry, since we mentioned it earlier, about generations, minimalism and maximalism in poetry, minima and maxima moralia, about how a poet is made and so on. I completed everything in 2024. I spent a lot of time with Andrei, while re-reading his books and while writing that preface. I thought a lot about him and about our friends.

AGERPRES: It was also last year that you republished your book of poetry 'Juventus,' which was first published in 1994, with several poems written between 1984 and 2021 added to it, which perfectly illustrate the manner in which your poetry changed in time, so naturally and organically. Why did you decide to republish the book now?

Simona Popescu: I didn't. In general, when I republish one of my books, it is because a publisher invites me to do it. This time the initiative belonged, again, to Cristian Cosma, the head of the Casa de pariuri literare publishing house. The books wasn't meant for book stores this time and it was distributed for free to high schoolers in Brasov. I also gave some copies to some students at the Faculty of Letters in Brasov, on the occasion of a triple launch organized there by the dean of the faculty, my and Andrei's friend, Adrian Lacatus.

So, last year, there were published 'Opera poetica Andrei Bodiu' [Andrei Bodiu. The Poetry Collection], my 'Juventus' and Caius's [Caius Dobrescu] new book of poetry 'Bolyai la Timisoara. O epopee onirica' [Bolyai in Timisoara. An Oneiric Odyssey]. The fact that the respective hall of the faculty was full was impressive and there were also many of Andrei's former students, who came for us, and our dear teacher from high school, our Romanian language and literature teacher, Mrs. Cornelia Bularca, who is also responsible, after all, for this part of our destiny. Because we wouldn't have gotten so close if it weren't for her, us four, and Grupul de la Brasov wouldn't have existed.

'Juventus' will also have an edition with a QR code, so that readers can also hear me reading my poems. It was, again, Cristian Cosma's initiative. I went to a recording studio, I sat in a room in front of a microphone, with my book in front, and I read as much as I could, without interruption. I don't know how it came out. I added 20 new poems to this new edition, most of them being from 'Cartea plantelor si animalelor' [The Book of Plants and Animals], which had the same theme of youth. I thought it was a good idea to bring together the poems I wrote as a young girl and those that I wrote much later. Because they are related. I also gave a title to the new ones: 'Neotenie' [Neoteny]. The word refers to youthfulness that remains inside during the maturity years as well.

I had a plan at some point to republish 'Juventus' alongside a cycle of poems about the beginning of old age. With extensions, remarks, rewriting of older poems. But I can still do this later, when I will really feel that I am getting old!

AGERPRES: Some of the poems from 'Juventus,' but also fragments from 'Exuvii', which I would say that is the equivalent in Romania of Salinger's 'The Cather in the Rye' for many generations of Romanian teenagers already, were included in several school textbooks. What do you think about that?

Simona Popescu: First of all, I am grateful for the comparison between 'Exuvii' and 'The Cather in the Rye.' For me, Salinger is someone very, but very important. His books are unbelievably pure. It's what I admire the most in literature. He used to say to Hemingway that he wanted to write a book in which to describe himself. I also felt that need, to write a book that will describe the strangeness of my own self. And this is what I did in 'Exuvii,' while pretending that it was a child in there I was writing about. There are entire generations of teenagers who find themselves in Holden Caulfield and I would be happy if my readers will continue to find something from their own experiences in it, something from what I feel and think. Although, maybe my 'characters' from 'Juventus' would be even close to Holden Caulfield, who represented the fight between the adult world and the teenagers' world. My next book too, which is soon to be published, will have such characters that are closer to him.

Otherwise, I do not know exactly if my texts are in the textbooks or what texts precisely. In the early 90s, a few excerpts from 'Juventus' were included in the textbook coordinated by literary critic Nicolae Manolescu. It was a huge surprise and a great honour for me. However, everything turned into a nightmare very soon: the scandal of the alternative textbooks. Besides me, there were the huge writer Mircea Horia Simionescu involved in this scandal, Ovidiu Verdes and others. Those admirable teachers who made the textbook thought that pieces from our work should be read by the young, while we had nothing to do with it. Anyways, those were only further reading (optional texts), nothing more.

We were treated like criminals, back then. Mr. Manolescu defended us, he said that 'Juventus' would be great for high schoolers. I remember that very well because I got emotional. Then the scandal ended, the textbook disappeared for a while, they found some pretext to eliminate it, or to eliminate the competition that Mr. Manolescu meant for them. There were also were - and maybe there still are - some other fragments from 'Juventus' in other textbooks. I was invited twice to write texts especially for some thematic sections in textbooks for the elementary school.

And also, a year ago, some teachers asked me to write a short story related to the war in Ukraine. I refused, because I believe that Ukrainians should write about that first. They politely insisted and then I told them that I will try, but that it won't be about the war, but about the refugees who came to Romania, because this was a reality that I knew, that impressed me, the solidarity back then, the compassion. It was also during the pandemic. People were nicer during that time. They changed so much! Some of them, at least. So I imagined a character, an Ukrainian boy who comes to Romania to start a new life here. In order to be able to write this story, I read a lot about the refugees in our country and about the children especially, about how they continue to do school online with their teachers from Ukraine for a while, about how these connections were then lost and they tried to integrate them with our Romanian schools, while they did not know Romanian language, about their every day relations in a foreign country. I looked at the matter from every angle. It wasn't easy. I wanted it to be a dense and authentic piece of writing.

Otherwise, what can I say? Textbooks change, true literature remains. So let's write, at least from time to time, true literature. And maybe we can leave something behind. And even if that doesn't happen, at least this was and is a beautiful life the writer's life. I couldn't have imagined it in any other way.

Simona Popescu is a graduate of the Faculty of Letters of the University of Bucharest, where she is currently teaching courses of avant-garde literature, experimental literature and creative writing. She published the poetry books: 'Xilofonul si alte poeme' [The Xylophone and Other Poems] (1990), 'Pauza de respiratie' [Breathing Pause] (together with Andrei Bodiu, Caius Dobrescu and Marius Oprea, 1991), 'Juventus' (1994), partially republished in the anthology 'Juventus si alte poeme' [Juventus and Other Poems] (2004) and completely in the collection 'Opera poetica' (2021) [The Poetry Collection], and in 'Lucrari în verde. Pledoaria mea pentru poezie' [Works in Green or My Defence of Poetry], 2006, and 'Cartea plantelor si animalelor' [The Book of Plants and Animals] (2001). She also published the novel 'Exuvii' [Exuviae] (1997; seven editions until 2021), an essay book, 'Volubilis' (1998), two books of critifiction about the work of surrealist poet Gellu Naum, 'Salvarea speciei. Despre suprarealism si Gellu Naum' [Saving the Species. About Surrealism and Gellu Naum] (2000) and 'Clava. Critifictiune cu Gellu Naum' [Clava. Critifiction with Gellu Naum] (2004), and also 'Autorul, un personaj' [The Author, A Caharcter] (a PhD thesis, 2015). She coordinated the writing of the collective novel 'Rubik' (2008), which was signed by 29 young authors. Her poems and her novel were translated into several foreign languages. For 'Cartea Plantelor si Animalelor' [The Book of Plants and Animals], Simona Popescu received The Best Poetry Book of 2021 award at the Young Writers Gala, 2022, The Radio Romania Culture Award for Poetry, 2022, The Poetry Book of the Year award, at the 'George Bacovia' National Festival BAC-FEST, 2022, The Poetry Award of the Observator cultural magazine, 2022; The Sofia Nadejde Award for Poetry, 2022. AGERPRES (RO - writing by: Cristina Zaharia, editor: Mariana Ionescu)