Cristina Boncea

“It’s an intuitive board game, this book – Dixit, the terror of those who can’t tolerate ambiguity, but also of those who tolerate it too much. When it’s your turn to be the Storyteller, you say a sentence to describe one of the six illustrated cards you’ve been dealt; the others have to guess which image you chose, and if nobody gets it, you lose; if everybody gets it, you lose again. Ideally, you choose a sentence that is clear, but not entirely; enigmatic, but not entirely. That’s pretty much what the sentences in Cristina’s book/card are like.” – Dan Sociu

“It’s hard for me to approach this book with a critic’s scalpel without having it morph – AI hallucinations / acid trip / cartoony Southern Gothic fever dream – into a twisted balloon sword: woven together in its mutant DNA, in a dizzying quad helix, are strands of total drama (and not just an island, since apparently there was enough budget for an entire Delululand), the black & pink braids of angsty, dark-ish novels and early-2010s Messenger IDs (which, in retrospect, have become frighteningly nostalgic), the multicoloured, sticky lint of punchy, blunt and slightly risqué one-liners (the way old-school Drăgoi used to deliver them) – and something else (an extra Rottweiler on top of the two standard-issue inner wolves). To call that something a paradoxical form of edgy fragility would be simplistic; but this irreverent / slightly unhinged self-irony also works as a fun form of radical empathy we didn’t know we needed. In short: it’s a total crack house / straight into the doll’s solar plexus.” – Florentin Popa

From the original 2025 back-cover blurb, translated from Romanian.

Critical reception

• Delululand was included in Octavian Plăiașu’s 2025 poetry retrospective for Observator Cultural, where he singled it out among the year’s poetry debuts and described its aesthetic as a fresh presence in contemporary Romanian poetry.
• In “Poezia la 2025” for Ramuri, poet and critic Călin Vlasie discusses Delululand in the context of new forms of poetic identity, describing its poetic self as “performative and digitally dispersed” and connecting the collection to a generation for whom the internet functions as an affective and mental infrastructure.
• In a 2025 Zona Motel dispatch from a London reading at Doña, Sofia Parkinson describes Boncea’s work as “stanzas that flowed like delusion scene building”, marked by “existential side-way glances” and “the contemporary absurdity of a digital native”, introducing her as the “international cool girl du jour” on her passage through the London poetry scene.
• In a 2026 survey for Tomis, poet Andrei Dósa selected Delululand as one of his five notable Romanian poetry books of 2025.
• In a 2026 review for Vatra, Andreea Pop reads Delululand as a visually intense, unconventional debut shaped by digital and pop culture, vulnerability, self-irony and a constant play of emotional extremes. She describes its poetic voice as highly individualised and radical, ultimately placing Delululand “among the remarkable debuts of recent years”.