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ISBN: 9781938160684
Platform/Publisher: Ebook Central / BOA Editions Ltd.
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Limited; Download: 7 Days at a Time
Subjects: Literature; Language/ Linguistics;
Slovenian poet and critic Debeljak (Without Anesthesia: New and Selected Poems) examines isolation, reconstruction, and historical and cultural change in post-independence Slovenia. Set in various locations around his home city, Ljubljana, this series of tonally folksy, yet formally rigid, long-lined poems (each in four quatrains) echoes with the mingling of historical and personal intimacies that haunts the speaker at every turn: "hidden sins are public virtues/ and all conversations are recorded, microphones are in the wall," he writes, "and the dark sheen of freedom: see you in the next war." The book is distinctly historical, and thereby political, yet Debeljak's insistence on formal consistency, humor, and adherence to his subject, along with translator Henry's efforts at retaining his syntactical and cultural idiosyncrasies, put the personal, and traditional, experience of those historical events at the forefront of this collection. A troubled national history and the continuing traumas of a young nation may well strike readers as the heart of the collection: "your words sound sincere when they are least true,/ the shapes of orange explosions would deserve the attention/ that every developed nation devotes to its sages,/ new styles of reading and promises broken like jumps/ over flames." Debeljak's engaging, accessible, eye-opening poems turn cultural dislocation into its own strange pleasure. Bilingual edition. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Ales Debeljak has published eight books of poetry and twelve books of essays in Slovenian. His books have appeared in English, Japanese, German, Croatian, Serbian, Polish, Hungarian, Czech, Spanish, Slovak, Finnish, Lithuanian, and Italian translation. Without Anesthesia: New and Selected Poems appeared from Persea Books in 2010. He has won the Preseren Foundation Prize, the Miriam Lindberg Israel Poetry for Peace Prize, the Chiqyu Poetry Prize in Japan, and the Jenko Prize. Debeljak teaches in the Department of Cultural Studies at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia.
Brian Henry is the author of ten books of poetry, most recently Brother No One (Salt Publishing, 2013). His translation of Tomaz Salamun's Woods and Chalices appeared from Harcourt in 2008, and his translation of Ales Steger's The Book of Things appeared from BOA Editions in 2010 and won the 2011 Best Translated Book Award. He has received numerous awards for his poetry and translations, including fellowships from the NEA, the Howard Foundation, and the Slovenian Academy of Arts and Sciences. He lives in Richmond, VA. |
