Negative Space
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
