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Book Title

A Wake for the Living

Subtitle
Poems (Bilingual Edition)
Author 1
Radmila Lazic; Translated from the Serbian by Charles Simic
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

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List Price
$14.00
ISBN
ISBN
978-1-55597-390-2
Format
Format
Paperback
Publication Date
Publication Date
Subject
Subject
Pages
Pages
144
Trim Size
Trim Size
6 x 9
Keynote
Pulitzer Prize-winner Charles Simic introduces and translates the poems of Serbian feminist, activist, and writer Radmila Lazic

About the Author

Radmila  Lazic
Credit: Nenad Milosevic
Radmila Lazic, born in 1949, is one of the best living Serbian poets. She is the author of six collections of poetry, for which she received several literary prizes. She has published numerous essays on literature and is the editor of an anthology of women's poetry and another of anti-war letters, and the founder and editor of the journal Profemina. Wake for the Living is the first translation of her poetry into English.

 
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Charles  Simic
 Charles Simic is a poet, essayist, and translator. His poetry has received the Pulitzer Prize and the International Griffin Prize, and he has served as United States Poet Laureate. He is professor emeritus of American literature and creative writing at the University of New Hampshire.
 
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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
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