The king of the Lithuanian publishing market, like in other countries, is the novel. That is why short prose collections are of no real interest to publishers – it does sometimes occur that works written not only by emerging but even by established authors are passed between publishing houses for years. Such a fate befell
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She was the first on the literary scene to debut as a bold critic, impervious to the influence of a small community where, because everyone knows everyone, one is no longer able (or no longer wants) to be objective. Virginija Cibarauskė was never afraid of deconstructing the works of geniuses or literary authorities, poking fun
leaving lazdynai lazdynai is so distant from where i live – new town and the neighborhoods surrounding it: old town, the station, krasnūcha and the center – that if it hadn’t been the half-year i spent in the video rental place, established in the lazdynai iki supermarket, the whole neighborhood
Virginija Kulvinskaitė Read More »
I once had an opportunity to watch a theater play in one of Crete’s mountain villages, at the altitude of about 1500 km – I went there with a theater troupe of one of Greece’s universities. The students staged a play based on a 16th century dramatic text Erotokritos, which contains a scene of a Cretan fighting
ORPHAN HOURS Some nights, submerged leviathans, intermittently recognized by dorsal fin patterns, break the surfaces of deep marine dreams, breech occasioning rough wakes, probing echolocations answered by the hard-pounding notes of the central organ. ~ Some nights, tined travelers with ultraviolet-tuned eyes recognize us dreamers slumped under snowy sheets, like lichens, waiting to nourish something;
There is this saying that’s been long used among acclaimed Lithuanian poets: a poet’s talent can be recognized from a single poem. And now Mindaugas Nastaravičius – a poet, playwright, and journalist – has written a book that only consists of a single one. Bendratis (“Common Wheel”) may seem a little pretentious at first, yet this expectation
Poetry Not about the Father Read More »
Infinitive I thought I had already written everything, though I didn’t know a word about you, and then I understood it’s time in this room of memory, to tear out the load-bearing wall, to rip up that feeble construction holding a person or barn, the hopes of you and me, slowly ebbing no matter how
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I don’t know who or what I am. I used to think I was a plant. Not the kind that burrows its roots into the soil of an old farmstead and feeds off the lifeblood of its ancestors, but a plant in a flower pot that a fickle housewife constantly moves from the window sill
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The gently erotic poems of Denmark-based poet Rima Juškūnė are deceitful. Having chosen the iris as the most distinctive element of her debut book, she was tempting the readers to recall the sweet, sticky childhood candy and the careless symbolism of the woman as a flower. Yes, Juškūnė’s poetry may be called sensuous. It misleads those,
The New Body Empathy Read More »
solarium when you consider how they’ll close you in and shove you into fire or into the ground, think: it’s a solarium solaris a pilot’s sunglasses and sunrays going right through the bones vacation at night I dream of floods: mother, drinking my milk, sighs sated and white between the lambs and wool; on a
