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Luljeta Lleshanaku
Child of Nature
Translated by Henry Israeli and Shpresa Qatipi
ISBN 978-0-8112-1847-4; Online Ordering

In my house praying was considered a weakness,
like making love.
And like making love
it was followed by a long night
of fear,
so alone with the body.

         —Luljeta Lleshanaku

A fresh voice from the Balkans and an award-winning poet from Albania, Lleshanaku explores her country’s past in intense and powerful lyrics. Lleshanaku belongs to the first “post-totalitarian” generation of Albanian poets. Child of Nature is her second poetry collection available in English. Here she turns to the fallout of her country’s past and its relation to herself and her family. Through intense, powerful lyrics, she explores how these histories intertwine and influence her childhood memories and the retelling of her family’s stories. Sorrow, death, imprisonment, and desire are some of the themes that echo deeply in Lleshanaku’s beautiful poems, poems that Peter Constantine has called “contemporary classics of world literature.” Of her work, Albanian novelist Ridvan Dibra writes, “When you close her book, the images don’t leave you. They cleave you open like a leopard’s paw, and enter into you. Once inside they create their own life, a second life, vastly different from the original.”

“Lleshanaku does not dwell on the harsh past and the brutal climate she knew as a child. Rather, she celebrates the variety of new experience, filling her verse with powerful imagery and stark, surprising visions.”
—Multicultural Review

“She is a love poet.... She makes explicit what it means to live in a violent and corrupt public world which penetrates privacy and betrays every intimacy.”
—Allen Grossman