Dreaming Escape
Valentina Saracini, Erica Weitzman (translation), Flora Ismaili (translation), Rudina Jasini (translation)“In Erica Weitzman’s resolute translation, Valentina Saraçini’s staccato-grammared voice sketches a double space—the pulsing emotional landscape of resistance, negation, revision, set in a particular place of trees, stones, gods, color, history. A subtle navigational chart to an inner coast of Albania we have not known of until now.” — Natasa Durovicova
Saraçini joins together the grimly political and the intensely personal, moving through a psychological universe full of impossible geographies, fallible gods, absence & fog & longed for escapes. What emerges from these lines is a space somewhere beyond grief, where one is still vulnerable to the shocks of both individual & collective calamity. The poems in this collection both question and dream, imagine & mourn, displace fear with loneliness, loneliness with occasional calm. Eastern European Poets Series #19.
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Valentina Saraçini, born in Skopje, Macedonia, currently lives in Prishtina, Kosovo, where she is known both for her poetry & her work as a journalist and in terviewer. In Dreaming Escape, her second book of poetry, Saraçini joins together the grimly political to the intensely personal, moving through a psychological universe based on a richly evocative system of motifs, embodied abstractions, & symbols. What emerges from these lines is the voice of a worn-out Cassandra in an age beyond either grief or mourning, yet still vulnerable to the shocks of both individual & collective calamity: a voice that will long serve as witness in the development of Kosovar Albanian literature. Poems in this collection have previously appeared in 91st Meridian, Two Lines: World Writing in Translation, & Portals: a Journal of Comparative Literature.