Negative Space

by Luljeta Lleshanaku, Ani Gjika (Translator)

Overview

Lleshanaku’s poems are “full of objects and souls, transformed and given wings in Chagall-like metaphor” (Sasha Dugdale, Poetry Nation Review)

*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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781780374130
Publisher:	Bloodaxe Books
Publication date:	03/01/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	136
File size:	331 KB

About the Author

The author of seven poetry collections, Luljeta Lleshanaku was born in Elbasan, Albania, in 1968, and grew up under house arrest during Enver Hoxha’s Stalinist regime. She has worked as a teacher, literary magazine editor, journalist, screenwriter, and currently is the research director at the Institute of Studies of Communist Genocide in Albania.

Ani Gjika is an Albanian-born writer, a literary translator, and the author of Bread on Running Waters (2013), a finalist for the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize and May Sarton New Hampshire Book Prize.

Table of Contents

From Almost Yesterday (2012)

Almost Yesterday 3

Small-Town Stations 5

The Unknown 7

History Class 8

Children of Morality 10

Night Fishing 12

Tobacco 15

Used Books 17

Negative Space 19

Mine, Yours 29

The End of Summer 31

Via Politica 33

The Deal 35

In the Town of Apples 37

Acupuncture 39

First Week of Retirement 41

A Conversation with Charles Simic 43

The Business of Dying 45

Metallic 47

The Body's Delay 51

Two by Two 53

Gloves 55

I Came, I Saw, I Left… 57

Index 59

Transit Terminal 61

Live Music 63

Ramesses's Last Journey 65

From Homo Antarcticus (2015)

Homo Antarcticus 69

Something Bigger Than Us 87

Menclaus's Return 89

The Railway Boys 91

Metamorphosis 93

January 1, Dawn 95

Aging 96

Fishermen's Village 98

Commit to Memory 100

Cities 102

Anatomical Cut 104

Self-Portrait in Woven Fabrics 106

Water and Carbon 109

This Gesture 123

The Stairs 125

Lost in Translation 127

A Perfect Day 129

One's Destiny 131

Inside a Suitcase 132

Things I Like About Him 134

Translator's acknowledgments 135

Editorial Reviews

05/07/2018
Celebrated Albanian writer Lleshanaku interrogates the boundaries between politics and family life in these poems culled from her previous collections, Almost Yesterday (2012) and Homo Antarcticus (2015). Wry and self-aware, Lleshanaku’s writing posits the public, political, and economic realms as inherently unstable, with domestic life as a grounding force. For Lleshanaku, what happens inside the home remains intimate and mysterious: “To show someone your library is an intimate gesture,/ like giving him a map, a tourist map of the self.” As the work unfolds, so does the interplay between public and private life, starting with the speaker’s childhood: “And I was raised on the via politica/ with the grease of yesterday’s glories,/ a thick grease collected under arctic skies.” Here, Lleshanaku positions domestic life as the infrastructure that supports, upholds, and sustains the political realm, and reminds the reader that political ideologies, like family ties, are inherited. Lleshanaku presents the domestic, its unseen labor and stabilizing force, as endangered by oppressive political regimes. But she also suggests that resistance begins at home, envisioning a revolution that empowers women most of all. Though the thinking behind Lleshanaku’s poems consistently impresses, the book’s tonal uniformity and formal consistency fail to do her provocative ideas justice. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

"Lleshanaku writes poetry that estranges everyday objects and images of people, imbuing them with a sense of wonder most would ignore or simply not see."

Kenyon Review - Sanam Shahmiri

"Lleshanaku's work is so full of life and vivid detail that it rings with hope and a revivifying ambition."

The Poetry Review - George Szirtes

"Peculiar magic."

World Literature Today

"Twilit melancholy suffuses her Albania, where ‘Soft rain falls like apostrophes in a conversation between two worlds,’ family trees are ‘struck down by a bolt of lightning,’ and most days echo with ‘a gray metallic loneliness.’ These details coalesce to paint the Albania of her internal exile and, in the end, we feel blessed that Ms. Lleshanaku has invited us to ‘the takeoffs and landings / on the runway of her soul.’"

The New York Times - Dana Jennings

"Hers are certainly poems about history, politics, and power. But Lleshanaku is also original. When she turns her attention to love, the sense of human fate is unsparing. The tyrant’s insistence that there is no private realm has the unintended effect of making it necessary to write powerful and durable poems."

The Guardian - Sean O’Brien

"Lleshanaku has a dizzying talent of capturing our notes of destruction. Wonderfully melancholic."

The Millions - Nick Ripatrazone

"With a lesser known original language, the more precious the gift of translation! Luljeta Lleshanaku's Negative Space offers a rare glimpse into contemporary Albanian poetry. Effortlessly and with crisp precision, Ani Gjika, herself a poet, has rendered into English, not only the poems in Negative Space, but also the eerie ambience which resonates throughout the book, the deep sense of impermanence that is one of the many consequences of growing up under severe political oppression. 'Negative space is always fertile.' Opening trauma's door, we're met by a tender and intelligent voice with stories illuminating existence in a shared humanity, thus restoring dignity. In a world fractured by terror and violence, Lleshanaku's poetry is infinitely exciting, soothing us, its citizens."

Griffin Prize Judges Citation

"Luljeta Lleshanaku is an Albanian poet, born in Elbasan in 1968."

London Review of Books - Michael Hofmann

"Language that’s at once immediate and new: a black and white floor is 'like a mouth of broken teeth, a baleen of darkness / sieving out new human destinies.' Urgent and original."

Boston Globe - Nina MacLaughlin

"Clarity can take many forms. One of them, at least in the poetry of Lleshanaku, results in aphoristic lines, evidence of hard-earned wisdom... Lleshanaku's movement from the ordinary to the profound, that assured intuitive leap, is handled without effort, without pretension, recalling the work of poets such as the Nobel-winning Polish author Wislawa Szymborska."

Rain Taxi