Adriana Oniță, Poet

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Adriana Oniță, Poet

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✨Poet who writes & teaches in English, Romanian, Italian, Spanish and French
✨Founder of The Polyglot
✨Editorial director of the Griffin Poetry Prize
✨PhD in Arts-based Language Education

28/08/2026

A few snaps from the lovely Agatha Press summer launch yesterday! Such beautiful risograph chapbooks. Long live small presses, congrats Matthew Stepanic and his coworker Agatha!!!

25/08/2026

Drawing dancers is one impossible task I gave myself this summer 😂 I love riding my bike to Walterdale Bridge to witness the weekly house sessions that one of my bestpals organizes, We/Us/Our. I am bewildered by the dancers. So buoyant, elastic, yet so grounded, teetering in that tension between control and longing, plan and surprise.

I begin with a continuous line drawing, never lifting my pen from the page. I follow the way their feet press, pulse across the pavement. I need a brushstroke that surprises and delights, so I use my Japanese brush pen.

I realize quickly that keeping up with each precise pivot as it happens is impossible. It’s like trying to memorize a poem by heart, given only a second to do so. Or trying to desperately jot down a dream before the details disappear into time.

I crumple up the first drawing, so frustrated I can’t capture the shapes as they happen. The voguing, toe-tapping, hip-hovering, spine-spiraling. I think of Annie Dillard trying to follow stunt pilot Dave Rahm, thinking she might actually snap from the sheer effort to track and “remember the line’s long intelligence.”

I try blind contour, never looking down at the page, to observe their movement, rhythm, weight shifts, energy. Crumple it up again. Try ink and pastel.

When I took a workshop with Raoul Wilke 🐨 that We/Us/Our organized, I realized house dancers work with the same foundations as poets: rhythm (meter, cadence, repetition), pause (line & stanza breaks), pivots (voltas). They learn all the rules just to break them. Their deep knowledge of form enables freedom. Then: the love of surprise, the urge to subvert the steps they’ve learned by heart, to disrupt expectation, to innovate form within tradition.

I learned a lot just through apprenticeship of observation. We write and dance to remind ourselves of what’s been inside us all along. I’m forever grateful to my pal Sekou for creating such fun, welcoming and playful spaces in the city. Thank you to the lovely dancers as well 💜

19/08/2026

I love The Sealey Challenge and I look forward to it every August. I get to read old books, new books, chapbooks, debut books, translated books, library books, translingual books, books for work, anthologies... I love encountering so many different styles and approaches to poetry in such a short period of time and thinking about what makes a poem stay with me.

Here are some of the memorable poems I loved from the first third of this year’s Sealey Challenge:

—“Ars Poetica” by Aracelis Girmay from Kingdom Animalia, Boa Editions | Nonprofit Indie Publisher

—“Weeds” by Diane Seuss from Modern Poetry, Fitzcarraldo Editions, Diane Seuss

—“Years, Months and Days” by Luke Hathaway from On Occasion: Poems for the People Edited by Sina Queyras, Coach House Books

—“Faceless” by Tongo Eisen-Martin from Heaven is All Goodbyes, Tongo, City Lights Booksellers & Publishers

—“Loneliness is a Condition Institutionally Created and Instated to Control and Subdue the Populace” by Chris Hutchinson, Lost Signal, Palimpsest Press, Chris Hutchinson

—”ihkatawâw ay-itwêhiwêw - The Marsh Sends a Message” by Naomi McIlwraith, kiyâm, Athabasca University Press

—”The New Life,” by Raúl Zurita (trans. Jack Schmitt), from Anteparadise, University of California Press

—”Clean Ponds” by A. Daniyal, Cactus Press, Daniyal Ulysses Amed

—”When They Ask What it Means to Love Thy Neighbour” by Nicole Lachat, from The Red We Silk, Nicole Lachat, Southern Indiana Review

—”Death Dea Not End At the Sea, iii” by Gbenga Adesina, Death Does Not End At the Sea, University of Nebraska Press, Gbenga Adesina

11/08/2026

𝙏𝙧𝙖𝙘𝙚 𝘼𝙢𝙤𝙪𝙣𝙩𝙨 is here!!! Immense thanks to the beautiful & unique Edmonton-based chapbook publisher Agatha Press (Agatha Press) for bringing this work into the world. It is a limited numbered edition of 125 risograph-printed copies in red, blue, and black ink.

We’ll be launching on August 27 at 7 p.m. at Borden Park, alongside the other Agatha Press chapbook authors of the summer season :)

The chapbook features my long poem, “Girl / Gârla,” which was shortlisted for PRISM international’s Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize, judged by Jillian Christmas Jillian Christmas, and The Capilano Review’s fall contest, judged by Tabako on the Windowsill, but ultimately never found a home in print.

It’s a chapbook about rivers, flowing between Romanian & English, girlhood & motherhood, beauty & danger, shame & freedom, otrăvă & hrană.

All the rivers I love run through it. Gârla ~ the one with no name. Kisiskâciwani-sîpiy ~ the one that flows at a pace I can paint. Cefalino ~ the one that’s purer than silver. Sossio ~ the one I’ve never seen, only heard.

You can order 𝙏𝙧𝙖𝙘𝙚 𝘼𝙢𝙤𝙪𝙣𝙩𝙨 through the Agatha Press website for $13!!! Thank you to my long-time editor Matthew Stepanic (Matthew Stepanic), the first publisher and cheerleader of my work! ❤️

07/08/2026

Thank you On Creative Writing for the wonderful interview questions that helped me reflect on my own process ❤️

"Get to know your own 'art circadian rhythms.' It took me a lot of reflection and trial and error to understand the times and conditions that work best for me—for writing poetry versus making visual art, translating, editing, etc. For instance, visual art feels most accessible to my brain; I can move in and out of it easily, so I’ve learned to use the in-between spaces for it. I’ll make a collage between a meeting and a workshop, doodle while waiting for the train, edit photos or videos on the bus, or stop to paint my surroundings on my way home.

Poetry feels completely different to me. It feels more like a ceremony. There’s a before and an after. I need at least two dedicated two hours, usually at night. It requires a kind of sacred ritual. A seduction. Scaramanzia. It helps to know these art circadian rhythms so we can meet each practice on its own terms, and honour what our body already knows."

Photo: my outdoor desk in Jilava, Romania

06/08/2026

July of voracious reading & severe thunderstorms & sketching dancers & hearing Emma’s laughter from Sophie’s garden & raspberries & round robins on the porch with Nicole & presenting bilingual poems at Boian Days, a Romanian festival in the middle of the prairies & reading alongside the sensational poet, producer, composer, and educator Kaz Mega at the Nightingale Spoken Word Series at Kasbar & sharing poems at the Unitarian Church of Edmonton, in a music & spoken word concert created by Rev. Audrey Brooks, an amazing poet and justice advocate & drawing beside my best friend, artist and teacher Lébassé & remembering that drawing always brings me home to poetry when I stray far & sketching house dancers under Walterdale Bridge, to get closer to rhythm, pause, pivots in poetry, in a weekly session organized by Sekou & devouring books on the porch, by Jhumpa Lahiri, Annie Dillard, Sadiqa de Meijer, Maggie Burton, Naomi McIlwraith, Lisa Martin & reunited with my love Nicole Lachat on the porch, who I started this poetry journey with! & carrying Nicole’s book with me everywhere, because I think it’s one of the best poetry collections I’ve ever read & seeing my own book in more of my friends’ homes has brought me so much joy in July!!

27/07/2026

Edmonton friends, I'm so happy to keep sharing poems from my debut collection this summer. I'd love to see you at one (or both!) of these events:

✨ July 30 — The Nightingale Series, alongside the wonderful Kaz Mega, a poet I've admired for many years. Join us at 7pm at The Kasbar on Whyte Avenue. There'll also be an open mic!

✨ August 16 — 4pm at the newly renovated Hawrelak Park (Picnic Site #2), as we celebrate 10 years of The Polyglot. Bring a dish, a poem, or simply yourself.

I'll have signed copies of Descântec For My Split Tongue available for $22. 🤍 Palimpsest Press

Thank you so much for your support!

Photo by the beautiful Shawna Lemay

01/07/2026

What a month!!!! Thinking of all the beautiful people that made it so memorable in Marsala, Toronto, Calgary, and Edmonton. ❤️ Mulțumesc. Special thank you to Palimpsest Press, Another Story Bookshop, Shelf Life Books, Single Onion Poetry Society, River Street, Audreys Books, and .marsala for helping me welcome this first book into the world! You can purchase Descântec For My Split Tongue from my publishers website, independent bookstores, and anywhere else you get your books.

26/06/2026

I really enjoyed the Coffee Dates with Authors interview with Selena Mercuri | Writer, Editor, Book Publicist. If you haven't yet, subscribe to the Substack!

At the end of the interview, Selena asks writers to offer a piece of advice for others, and I found myself talking about something I do surprisingly often: I play George Costanza's "Opposite" game and spend an entire day doing the opposite of what my instincts tell me.

For example, if I've been writing short vignettes, I'll challenge myself to write a poem with impossibly long lines. If I feel like going on a photowalk, I'll make a collage instead, using things I find on my walk (like in the background of this image). Following what's unfamiliar is so fun, and results in stuff I wouldn't have expected.

Besides Seinfeld, this practice is also inspired by Shawna Lemay's advice in Shawna Lemay to "change your vessel" (which she does so beautifully, changing it up between novels, poems, photos, and essays).

I also love Diane Seuss and C.D. Wright, whose work reminds me that every new project can invent its own form, and be entirely different from the last.

Do you play the opposite game?!

Address

Via Boeo, 18

91025

Website

http://adrianaonita.com/

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