It was today

Born in Sibiu, Romania on December 20, 1946; emigrated to the United States in 1966; became U.S. citizen in 1981; poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter; columnist on National Public Radio; editor of Exquisite Corpse, a literary journal on line at www.corpse.org; MacCurdy Distinguished Professor of English at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. RECENT BOOK: POETRY: It Was Today - New Poems by Andrei Codrescu (Coffee House Press, 2003) In praise of Andrei Codrescu\'s poetry, Harper\'s says \"his command of language is superb, his writing beautifully original, and his insights piercing.\" The heart of this first new collection in nearly a decade is an elegant conceit containing the \"recently discovered\" correspondence between a warrior and a courtesan in fourteenth-century China. This sequence offers a seductively beautiful contrast to poems about modern life and millennial malaise that are both unsparing and intimate, inventive and playful. With great passion and playfulness disguised in an audacious, world-weary voice, these poems examine the state of the world-its politics, its media, its tragedies, it obsessions, its debaucheries and the great affairs-with art, with cars, with lovers-that make it all worthwhile.