Lidija Dimkovska’s poems presented here are all the more compelling in the plain-spoken way they grapple with their before and after perceptions of death. Recalling the best of Wislawa Symborska, they offer their clear-sighted vision with startling precision and understated grace.
In these quasi-haiku by Marc Delouze, poetry speaks to the blind in words that crack open to make us see. Though these words are like spider thread, they spin in “barbed orbits” to “tear the sky from [our] ears” that the soul might be broken by them.
–Barbara Siegel Carlson
Barbara Siegel Carlson is the author of What Drifted Here (Cherry Grove, 2023), Once in Every Language (Kelsay, 2017) and Fire Road (Dream Horse, 2013). She is the co-translator (with Ana Jelnikar) of Look Back, Look Ahead, Selected Poems of Srečko Kosovel and co-editor (with Richard Jackson) of A Bridge of Voices: Contemporary Slovene Poetry and Perspectives. Her poetry, translations and essays have appeared in Verse Daily, Cortland Review, Mid-American Review, Salamander, Slovene Studies and elsewhere. Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart prizes. A fourth book of poems The Current is forthcoming in 2026.
