forgiveness is a disappearing act

"I was brought up in the Balkans, in a language that does not exist," Niko Lazetic once wrote. The poems in this searing debut collection gather the self's shards in order to forgive history, "a misnomer for canceled presents." They speak in a language before and after language, at the threshold of the imaginable, as if in a waking dream. Their sense of poiesis is such that to trace their story would be to betray the brittleness of their spectral lucidity.