Smugglers

The poems in Smugglers move through rapid historical shifts and meditations on personal experience, exploring the depths and limits of comprehension through the people and geography of the Balkans. Ultimately, Ales Debeljak's urban imagination creates a mosaic-intimate and historical-of a vanished people and their country. Every poem in Smugglers is sixteen lines long-four quatrains, a common form for Debeljak. This structural regularity is reinforced by a commitment to visual balance, with each poem working as a kind of grid into which the poet pours memories and associative riffs. From "Bookstore": At least you are blessed. Winter's here. In darkness, awake since yesterday, I came to browse again through the titles of old books, wobbly skyscrapers, writers of my youth and stiffened honey. No opening hours on the door, a minor poet with no woman sits behind files in the front. I know him from when we all shouted in one loyal voice, collected works on sale for a handful of cents,