Description

Translated byBrian Henry (White Pine Press, paperback)

Publication Date:May 10, 2022

Publisher Marketing:The poems in Ale tegersThe Book of Bodiesroam across personal experience, human history, and the natural world to unlock intellectual and emotional connections.

Ale tegersThe Book of Bodiesdirectly followsand builds on and veers fromThe Book of Things. The 50 poems inThe Book of Thingsfocus on such everyday objects as umbrellas, chairs, and candles, and in so doing illuminate the human condition, particularly its propensity for violence, deception, and forgetting. The 50 poems inThe Book of Bodiesmanage to be simultaneously more and less restrictive: half the poems are prose poems (of five paragraphs each) that roam across personal experience, human history (individual and collective), and the natural world to unlock intellectual and emotional connections; the other half are narrow stanzaless poems that focus on a single word. These poems have a sinuous, almost vaporous quality on the pagelines so thin that they serve as a response to the prose that dominates the first half of the book. Both types of poems inThe Book of Bodiesare essential to tegers understanding of the world.

Esteemed American readers, Ale teger is the real thing! He is the poet of inimitable gifts! He is one of the best Eastern European poets of his generation! It is the truth: teger is a marvelous voice, one that takes some of the playfulness of his Yugoslavian compatriots Vasko Popa and Toma alamun to the whole new level.
Ilya Kaminsky