Reviews

Rimantas Kmita is a poet, literary critic, and historian whose bearing combines restraint and provocation. He first entered the limelight when he wrote an alternative biography of the poet Justinas Marcinkevičius, who was called “the bard of the nation” during the Soviet years and after the re-establishment of the independence. Ištrūkimas iš fabriko: modernėjanti lietuvių poezija

Marius Povilas Elijas Martynenko is one of the most distinctive people and artists I have ever had the chance to know. Twenty-five years of his life encompass thirteen hypoglycemic comas, a number of different jobs, dropping out of university twice, a  stint on the stage, using his hypnotic voice, and shining at slam poetry competitions

Brought up in Klaipėda, with his first book Apie reiškinius (On Phenomena) published last year, poet Dovydas Grajauskas mainly concentrates on the origins of Christian reality, which he interprets distinctively in his poems. The junctions between several millennia and the present are exactly where the poetic effect of many Grajauskas’s works stems from. Reaching the beginning of

Jonas Žakaitis is a curator of conceptual and interdisciplinary art exhibitions. His first book, The 90s, is, to some extent, an interdisciplinary phenomenon. Its concept, a fundamental element of contemporary exhibitions, is its structure. The concept of an exhibition—the idea presented in its title and description—provides meaning to separate pieces; outside of the context of

Following the publication of Antanas Škėma’s Balta drobulė (The White Shroud) in Germany and high praise from publications like Spiegel magazine, an English translation of the novel, by Karla Gruodis, is soon to be published by Vagabond Voices (Glasgow). Born in 1910 in Łódź, Poland, Antanas Škėma is seen by Lithuanians as something between a teen idol (the decadently

Undinė Radzevičiūtė made her literary debut in 2003 with the small 88-page novel Strekaza. Her appearance in the literary field was open, powerful, and different: she consciously dissociated herself from the Lithuanian literary field and her sincere confession was placed on the back cover of the book: “I have never loved the L. [Lithuanian – J.Č.]

Laima Kreivytė (g. 1972 m.) is a unique figure in the world of Lithuanian poetry. And that’s not just because of her surname, which, combining kreivas (crooked, bent) and reivas (rave), seems to hint at the many meanings to be found in poetry. First of all, unlike many other Lithuanian poets, Kreivytė is not a philologist. She completed her

Gintaras Grajauskas (b. 1966) is one of those poets who, in my subjective opinion, people of various ages and interests may find difficult not to love. He belongs to a generation of writers born in the ’70s who finished work begun by an earlier generation—they rescued literature from excessive literariness and contrivance, and from the

Gytis Norvilas is a well-known literary figure in the world of Lithuanian literature. The cultural fields that interest Norvilas can best be described in an overview of his work—as the editor of the weekly Literatūra ir Menas magazine, a poet, an essayist and a translator. His first book of poems, Akmen-skeltės (Shards of Stone) (2002), received the Jaunojo Jotvingio

“Here’s my little, thin book,” I murmur diminutively, much as Žagrakalytė might, while flicking through Agnė Žagrakalytė’s barely 60-page poetry collection, Štai. I also consider how we use “Štai” (there) in everyday speech: with pride (“there, look at what I accomplished!”), when showing something to someone (“There, look at that castle”), with praise (“look at that