Poetry. Poems born in "a time of abrupt needs," this collection catalogs those individual and imperative fancies that, in the cosmos of Tomaz Salamun, eternity aims to replace: A genealogy of dressmakers and songbirds. A biography that locates the poetic "I" as, at once, a primordial being and a tamer of beasts, a monster and a guardian angel. With uncanny and sometimes harrowing grace, Salamun plumbs every reach of the imagination in search of a space where we can delight in and mourn the disintegration of the body. The nine translators who collaborated to bring out this new book by a "major Central European poet" (The New Yorker) include Thomas Kane, Peter Richards, Phillis Levin, Joshua Beckman, Ana Jelnikar, Christopher Merrill, Matthew Rohrer, Brian Henry, and Anselm Hollo.

Author Hometown: Zagreb CRO



About the author: Tomaz Salamun was born in 1941 in Zagreb, Croatia, and raised in Koper, Slovenia. He has published thirty collections of poetry in his home country and has received many prizes and fellowships at home and in the U.S., including a Fulbright and Pushcart Prize. As a young poet Salamun edited Perspektive, a progressive cultural and political journal. Communist authorities eventually banned the journal's publication, and arrested Salamun. His first two books, POKER (1966) and The Purpose of the Cloak (1968), were released in samizdat. Salamun has won the praise of many poets, including James Tate, Robert Creeley, Robert Hass, who celebrates his "love of the poetics of rebellion," and Jorie Graham, who calls his work "one of Europe's great philosophical wonders."