Witness Protection

By: Iorga, Romana

Winner of the Fall 2025 Black River Chapbook Competition

Witness Protection is a meditation on memory and language--the fragile anchors that allow identity to endure. The collection explores inherited pasts, the places we leave behind, and the stories that shape our understanding of who we are. The poems move between personal experience and imaginative landscapes, examining how language can preserve, transform, and sometimes rescue what time threatens to erase. Woven through are acts of attention and care: the responsibility of remembering, the need to protect vulnerable histories, and the search for connection across geographical, generational, and emotional distances.

This collection considers the relationship between human life and the natural world, asking how belonging might be reimagined through deeper forms of kinship and awareness. With a voice that is both intimate and expansive, Witness Protection creates a space where memory becomes a form of survival and imagination a means of renewal. It examines what we preserve, transform, and carry forward, reflecting on the stories and relationships that shape our lives and define our sense of belonging.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1625572476
• ISBN13: 9781625572479
• Release Date: June 2027
• Publisher: Black Lawrence Press
• Length: 40 Pages