Ivanescu's poetry represents the achievement of a little known master. Centring on a wide cast of characters, including his alter ego 'mopete', Ivanescu's idiosyncratic, lyrical sensibility offers allusive, comic and elegiac meditations on our common lot. lines poems poetry - three generic, lower-case nouns, an unassuming title for the first book-length presentation in the English-speaking world of an author who comes across as anything but generic. The neutral title of this book, which gathers a representative selection from the core of Mircea Ivanescu's oeuvre, is emblematic of the poet's self-effacing persona while it likewise echoes his own practice. This persona is central to his idiosyncratic, almost diffident lyricism, one equally self-interrogating and anti-lyrical, a poetry playful on the one hand and serious on the other, wry, complex, but approachable. Cover Art and Colour Section Florica Prevenda takes the face as a fundamental theme and contemplates the wide range of emotions and anxieties that haunt the human condition nowadays, including the developing depersonalisation of social networks and the reification of consumerism. Existentially pithy messages are inscribed through the surface. As with Ivanescu's poetry, the affects are elusive, yet evocative.