Keynote
Pulitzer Prize-winner Charles Simic introduces and translates the poems of Serbian feminist, activist, and writer Radmila Lazic
Book Title
A Wake for the Living
Subtitle
Poems (Bilingual Edition)
Cover Image
- “There is something bittersweet about Lazic’s utterly convincing work, which has the texture of lived experience. . . Lazic has a jaunty wit, a restless and irreverent intelligence and a startling way of stalking the truth.”—Washington Post Book World
Body
Dead-born will be your wishes.
Your every hope will be a widow.
And as for love, there won't be enough
To spread on a slice of bread.
--from "Twilight Metaphysics"
Translated and introduced with the surrealist wit that is Charles Simic's signature, A Wake for the Living offers American readers, for the first time in English, the brilliance of Serbian poet Radmila Lazic. Through her compelling and strange leaps and dodges, Lazic describes an identity-personal and political-informed by catastrophe and victimization that restlessly and imaginatively swerves into irreverence and often-comic absurdity. "Goodness is boring," she writes, "It seems it's hell I'm getting myself ready for." These poems careen from the poet's lament for beauty faded to her "Dorothy Parker Blues" to her searching for names among obituaries to her sexual desires without obligation, with the virtuosity that has made her one of Eastern Europe's best and most vivacious contemporary poets.
A Lannan Translation Series Selection
Your every hope will be a widow.
And as for love, there won't be enough
To spread on a slice of bread.
--from "Twilight Metaphysics"
Translated and introduced with the surrealist wit that is Charles Simic's signature, A Wake for the Living offers American readers, for the first time in English, the brilliance of Serbian poet Radmila Lazic. Through her compelling and strange leaps and dodges, Lazic describes an identity-personal and political-informed by catastrophe and victimization that restlessly and imaginatively swerves into irreverence and often-comic absurdity. "Goodness is boring," she writes, "It seems it's hell I'm getting myself ready for." These poems careen from the poet's lament for beauty faded to her "Dorothy Parker Blues" to her searching for names among obituaries to her sexual desires without obligation, with the virtuosity that has made her one of Eastern Europe's best and most vivacious contemporary poets.
A Lannan Translation Series Selection
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About the Author
Credit: Nenad Milosevic
Praise
- “Lazic often adds unexpected perspectives to her funny, ribald lyricism…A vigorous antidote to prudery and moral correctness.”—Antioch Review
- “[Simic] has found within these poems and brought forth from the dark wit and deceptive simplicity that are the hallmarks of his own style.”—American Poet
- “A work of remarkable strength and confidence, a collection of poems that, while brash in its content, features a narrative voice unafraid to project its own vulnerability.”—Third Coast
- “A work of remarkable strength and confidence, a collection of poems that, while brash in its content, features a narrative voice unafraid to project its own vulnerability.”—Third Coast
