Böcker av Luljeta Lleshanaku

In my house praying was considered a weakness,like making love.And like making loveit was followed by a long nightof fear,so alone with the body.         -Luljeta LleshanakuLleshanaku belongs to the first "post-totalitarian" generation of Albanian poets. Child of Nature is her second poetry collection in English. Here she turns to the fallout of her country's past and its relation to herself and her family. Through intense, powerful lyrics, she 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. What more can we expect from real poetry, from true art?"

New collection by leading Albanian poet of work written since her first UK edition, Haywire: New & Selected Poems, was published by Bloodaxe in 2011. Ani Gjika's translation from the Albanian of Luljeta Lleshanaku's Negative Space was shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize 2019.

*Shortlist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize*"Language arrived fragmentary / split in syllables / spasmodic / like code in times of war," writes Luljeta Lleshanaku in the title poem to her powerful new collection Negative Space. In these lines, personal biography disperses into the history of an entire generation that grew up under the oppressive dictatorship of the poet's native Albania. For Lleshanaku, the "unsaid, gestures" make up the negative space that "gives form to the woods / and to the mad woman-the silhouette of goddess Athena / wearing a pair of flip-flops / and an owl on top of a shoulder." It is the negative space "that sketched my onomatopoeic profile / of body and shadow in an accidental encounter." Lleshanaku instills ordinary objects and places-gloves, used books, acupuncture needles, small-town train stations-with subtle humor and profound insight, as a child discovering a world in a grain of sand.

Luljeta Lleshanaku is one of Albania's foremost younger poets with a growing reputation in the US and Europe. Haywire is her first British publication, and draws on two editions published in the States by New Directions. Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation.