Eastern European Poetry Gift Box

$ 50.00 $ 79.00

This gift set contains five specially selected editions from our Eastern European Poets Series, which has been publishing poets in translation and émigré authors since 2003. This discounted and gift wrapped set includes translations of Albanian, Czech, Russian, Romanian, and Slovenian poetry. 

Valentina Saraçini’s Dreaming Escape, translated from the Albanian by Erica Weitzman, Flora Ismaili, and Rudina Jasini, is both grimly political and intensely personal, a poetry vulnerable to the shocks of both individual and collective calamity. (EEPS 19; bilingual edition)

Valentina Saraçini’s staccato-grammared voice sketches… a subtle navigational chart to an inner coast of Albania we have not known of until now. —NATASA DUROVICOVA 

Ivan Blatny’s The Drug of Art, spanning fifty years of his writing, is the first comprehensive English-language collection of one of the most significant Czech poets of the twentieth century. Blatny fled Czechoslovakia after the Communist coup in 1948, spending the rest of his life in England, continuing to write in Czech as well as producing unusual multi-lingual and English-language poems. Edited by Czech scholar Veronika Tuckerová and translated by Anna Moschovakis, Justin Quinn, Matthew Sweney, and Alex Zucker, The Drug of Art  includes a historical introduction by Tuckerová, a foreword by Josef Skvorecky, an afterword by Antonín Petruzelka. (EEPS 15; bilingual edition)

Blatny refreshes ideas of poetry as sibylline utterance, of the sublime confusion of negative capability and of giving an open yes to all contradictory things. DENISE DOOLEY

Igor Kholin’s Kholin 66: Diaries and Poems is a trampoline into the bohemian life of poets and artists living on the margins of Soviet society in the mid-1960s. In a string of acerbically related non-adventures, Kholin moves to the country, sleeps a lot, drinks and debauches among Moscow’s literary underground, and eventually moves back to the city, broke and bitter, writing about it all in terse, absurdist prose and unabashedly anti-poetic and self-satirizing poem, translated by Ainsley Morse and Bela Shayevich. (EEPS 40)

Moments of brilliance and imagination shine through the welts and bruises, revealing a surprisingly supple thinker and commentator, and a poet whose harsh, stubby lines read like nothing else in print. —GARY SULLIVAN

Mariana Marin’s Paper Children, translated from the Romanian by Adam Sorkin, collects the mature poems of one of the most uncompromising poets of the 1980s. Marin was the “poet maudit” of her generation and a prominent member of Bucharest literary society. Her poems, solemn and symbolically rich, are pained cries for justice, and Paper Children is a seminal example of oppositional poetry during the final years of totalitarian communism in Eastern Europe. (EEPS 14; bilingual edition)

For authentic writers, like Marin, there are no walls, no borders, no visas, no passports, but only one 'flag' that unites us all, people of the Wild East and the Wild West: beautiful poetry. —SAVIANA STANESCU


Tomaz Salamun’s
Poker is the first of more than two dozen books of poetry by this internationally renowned Slovenian post-war poet. Having had some tangles with the authorities as editor of the chief Slovenian cultural journal, Šalamun published Poker in 1966 in a small, underground, self-published edition, yet, its playful, anti-authoritarian, postmodern approach instantly became influential for an entire generation of poets in Slovenia and the rest of Yugoslavia. Translated by Joshua Beckman with the author, Poker was a finalist for the PEN America Poetry in Translation Award. The second edition includes an introduction by Matthew Rohrer. (EEPS 20)

It's the unraveling of youth, a document of that transitional period after you've finished your official education and must then begin to unlearn everything you've been taught: undefining in order to redefine. TRAVIS JEPPESEN