Luljeta Lleshanaku’s poems take place in a melancholy landscape of mountain villages, chestnut trees, and collapsing futures where ‘spring kills solitude with its solitude’ and the only emotional expression not considered a sign of weakness is impatience. The place of her poems is like a zero point that can only look out from itself in all directions at once. But the poet looks inward beyond paradox, and instead of judgment, she finds recognition. In Lleshanaku’s work, geography and soul are charted on the same map. The rhythms of her new poems are expertly managed to enact vulnerability and withdrawal. Her lines stretch out and suddenly retract into fragments with the sensitivity of snail horns.
—Forrest Gander

A powerful exploration of Albania’s intense totalitarian past.

Child Of Nature

by Luljeta Lleshanaku

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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Paperback (published February 1, 2010)

ISBN
9780811218474
Price US
13.95
Price CN
18
Trim Size
6x9
Page Count
108

Luljeta Lleshanaku

Contemporary Albanian poet

Luljeta Lleshanaku’s poems take place in a melancholy landscape of mountain villages, chestnut trees, and collapsing futures where ‘spring kills solitude with its solitude’ and the only emotional expression not considered a sign of weakness is impatience. The place of her poems is like a zero point that can only look out from itself in all directions at once. But the poet looks inward beyond paradox, and instead of judgment, she finds recognition. In Lleshanaku’s work, geography and soul are charted on the same map. The rhythms of her new poems are expertly managed to enact vulnerability and withdrawal. Her lines stretch out and suddenly retract into fragments with the sensitivity of snail horns.
—Forrest Gander
How to make poetry out of the nightmare of recent Albanian history? Luljeta Lleshanaku explores some of the ways in which public and private realms of experience meet and merge, in poems that haunt and delight in equal measures…These poems, these dark essays in ecstasy, see much further than we can imagine.
—Christopher Merrill, NPR
We feel blessed that Ms. Lleshanaku has invited us to ’the takeoffs and landings/on the runway of her soul'.
—New York Times
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