SOURCE: "Song of My Emerging Self: The Poetry of Andrei Codrescu," in MELUS, Vol. 18, No. 3, Fall, 1993, pp. 33-40.

In the following review, Orlich describes Codrescu's Comrade Past & Mister Present, the story of his self-integration into his adopted culture, as intensely personal and powerful.

For almost thirty years, since 1966, Andrei Codrescu has lived in the United States, absorbed a new culture, published more than twenty books, taught American university students, and broadcast weekly essays on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" on the American scene or world events from a peculiar perspective and in accented English. Now that knowledge of what has been happening in Eastern Europe is suddenly available, we might attend more carefully to the words of one who returned from those depths and is in a position to tell how the accumulation of the thousand miniature pictures of the two worlds can impress the memory and...