Vytautas Stankus – Nine lives

Vytautas Stankus was born in 1984 in the Mosėdis village, Skuodas, Lithuania. His poems first appeared in the press in 2007. He is now the author of four poetry books, the newest of which, Renkant Kaulus (Gathering the Bones), was published in 2024.

Stankus’s poetry is intimate, personal, even painful. He experiments interestingly with language and poetic form. The poems are fragmentary and fracturing – with snatches of dialogue and poem-questionnaires. They are paradoxical, surreal, yet dynamic and refined. Surrealism mixes with details of everyday life and quotidian speech. The poems are musical, making use of repetitions and recitative. They are made to last.