Reviews

When it comes to Ramunė Brundzaitė’s second book of poetry, fans and critics were forced to wait for some time. Her first collection of poetry, Butterfly, My Friend, was greeted with success, winning the Lithuanian Writers’ Union annual “First Book” prize and receiving two prestigious Lithuanian poetry awards. After nine years, I hold in my hands

One of Eglė Frank’s characters asks: “It‘s always interesting, when everything is just starting out, isn’t it?“ Well, I thought the same about her debut book, The Dead Also Dance. Here, short pieces transmit an encrypted message that something will “finally happen”: when the doors open, something will happen – perhaps a prophetic dream will finally

Rolandas Rastauskas’s latest book Venecija tiesiogiai (Venice Direct consists of several structural parts: a novel, several novellas, some short fictional texts, and a section that balances between poetry and prose dedicated to Dainius Liškevičius. Rastauskas’s work deliberately avoids the definition of a novel because with his artistic writing he creates a strong antithesis to what has so

It is with great pleasure that I can now introduce Jonas Mekas’ poetry to the English-speaking world. For a long time, Mekas was primarily known in America as a film critic, the founder (along with his brother Adolfas) of Film Culture magazine, a leading critic for The Village Voice. Certainly, people also talked about him as a major figure

Aivaras Veiknys is a well-known poet of the younger generation whose work has been recognized with important Lithuanian literary awards. Mamuto medžioklė (Mammoth Hunting) is Veiknys’s fourth book, and I would say it is seminal: in it, the essential features of Veiknys’s poetics take shape and his distinctive aesthetic program unfolds. I must confess that in the

“my name is ramūnas, i roam the mazes of the old city looking for an emergency exit in life”. Thus Ramūnas Liutkevičius introduces himself in his debut poetry book šokis įsuka šviesą (The Dance that Turns in the Light). Despite thus debut, Ramūnas Liutkevičius was already well-known to those who frequent slam poetry and spoken poetry evenings.

In the Western world, for two thousand years it was believed that a good work of art had to represent something that was not really there but certainly could be there. This is the foundation of mimetic representation, which even grammar school pupils are familiar with. More interesting times came in the Renaissance, when the

Once when I was writing about Dainius Gintalas’s poems, I called them efficacy poetry: poetry that talks about a condition in order to convey it effectively. Admittedly, we could debate whether this is not the goal of many, if not all, poets. However, in the work of Gintalas, who writes acerbic texts, the aim to

Aiški linija (A Bold Line) is the third poetry book by Nijolė Daujotytė. Her first poetry collection Vienmečiai augalai, published in 2003, earned her the Zigmas Gėlės literary prize, which is awarded to the best poetry debut of the year. In her third book, Daujotytė maintains and further develops her minimalist and subtle tone. The book’s title

It was October of 2018, the tenth issue of the literary journal, “Metai,” and it contained Valdas Papievis’s “Ėko.” It wasn’t a short story, as one might conjecture from the text’s structure, density and richness, but the subtitle called it a fragment of a novel, bestowing hope that in time it would become a novel. It