Lleshanaku’s work is so full of life and vivid detail that it rings with hope and a revivifying ambition.

George Szirtes, The Poetry Review

Luljeta Lleshanaku

Luljeta Lleshanaku was born in Elbasan, Albania. She grew up under house arrest during Enver Hoxha’s Stalinist regime. Lleshanaku has worked as a lecturer, literary magazine editor, journalist, and screenwriter, and is currently the research director at Tirana’s Institute of Studies of Communist Genocide. She is the author of eight poetry collections published in Albania. Her books have received many national and international awards and have been translated into several languages. New Directions also publishers her collections Child of Nature and Fresco: Selected Poems.

cover image of the book Negative Space

Negative Space

by Luljeta Lleshanaku

Translated by Ani Gjika

“Language arrived fragmentary / split in syllables / spasmodic / like code in times of war,” writes Luljeta Lleshanaku in the title poem to her powerful new collection Negative Space. In these lines, personal biography disperses into the history of an entire generation that grew up under the oppressive dictator- ship of the poet’s native Albania. For Lleshanaku, the “unsaid, gestures” make up the negative space that “gives form to the woods / and to the mad woman— the silhouette of goddess Athena / wearing a pair of flip-flops / and an owl atop her shoulder.” It is the negative space “that sketched my onomatopoeic profile / of body and shadow in an accidental encounter.” Lleshanaku instills ordinary objects and places—gloves, used books, acupuncture needles, small-town train stations—with subtle humor and profound insight, much as a child might discover a world in a grain of sand.

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cover image of the book Child Of Nature

Child Of Nature

In _Child of Nature, _Lleshanaku explores her country’s past in powerful lyrics. Here she turns to the fallout of her country’s past and its relation to herself and her family, and explores how these histories intertwine and influence her childhood memories and the retelling of her family’s stories. Sorrow, death, imprisonment, and desire are some of the themes that echo deeply in Lleshanaku’s beautiful poems, poems that Peter Constantine has called ’contemporary classics of world literature.’ Of her work, Albanian novelist Ridvan Dibra writes, ’When you close her book, the images don’t leave you. They cleave you open like a leopard’s paw, and enter into you. Once inside they create their own life, a second life, vastly different from the original.’

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cover image of the book Fresco

Fresco

Fresco: Selected Poetry of Luljeta Lleshanaku introduces to English-speaking readers the arresting work of Luljeta Lleshanaku, one of Albania’s foremost younger poets. Born in Elbasan in 1968, she grew up under virtual house arrest because of her family’s opposition to the Stalinist dictatorship of Enver Hoxha. She is foremost among the first generation of poets to emerge out of the cultural wasteland of enforced socialist realism in the arts, reinventing Albanian poetry almost entirely from scratch. In a voice at once firm yet quiet and spare, with haunting imagery that challenges the imagination, her highly charged poems carry the burden of her own and her country’s past. For Fresco, editor Henry Israeli has gathered fifty-eight poems from Luljeta Lleshanaku’s published books (The Sleepwalker’s Eyes, 1992; Sunday Bells, 1994; Half-Cubism, 1996; Antipastoral, 1999) as well as some newer work. His Afterword places her writing within its personal and social context, while an Introduction by the award-winning translator Peter Constantine views the poet from the wider perspective of modern Albanian literature.

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Lleshanaku’s work is so full of life and vivid detail that it rings with hope and a revivifying ambition.

George Szirtes, The Poetry Review

Lleshanaku writes poetry that estranges everyday objects and images of people, imbuing them with a sense of wonder most would ignore or simply not see.

Kenyon Review

We feel blessed that Ms. Lleshanaku has invited us to ’the takeoffs and landings/on the runway of her soul'.

New York Times

A child who paid for the political sins of her grandparents in Hoxha’s Albania; a young poet who seems to have been writing for a hundred years in a language that’s only been written for a hundred years; an erotic lyricist in the ruins of a state; Luljeta Lleshanaku is the real thing, and as unexpected as an oasis behind a mountain on the moon.

Eliot Weinberger

Lleshanaku does not dwell on the harsh past and the brutal climate she knew as a child. Rather, she celebrates the variety of new experience, filling her verse with powerful imagery and stark, surprising visions.

Multicultural Review
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