Lidija Dimkovska careens from pop culture to refugee laments in poems that traverse global trends: Since my brother hanged himself with the telephone wire/I can talk to him for hours on the phone

Lidija Dimkovska, pH Neutral History, Trans. by Ljubica Arsovska and Peggy Reid, Copper Canyon Press, 2012.

"Dimkovska pins readers to the wall with rapid-fire linguistic energy."—Publishers Weekly

"[Dimkovsaka has the] stunning capacity to transform the ridiculous into something poignant and utterly precise."—Boston Review

In her sixth collection of poetry, Macedonian poet and novelist Lidija Dimkovska scrutinizes life’s customary and trivial details in a quest for greater meaning. She writes from the intersection of boundaries; her poems are long-lined and prosaic, she references religious tenets and native folklore, and blends irony with nostalgia for her youth. The world which she sees and writes of is sharp-edged, vivid, and resonant with profound meaning. “Since my brother hanged himself with the telephone wire/I can talk to him for hours on the phone” opens the poem “National Soul,” continually returning to her reflections on death and its neutralization: life. With the observant and detailed eye of a nomad, Dimkovska’s world reassesses the insignificant and charges it with far-reaching significance. She doesn’t rely on expected poetic conventions: grave sentiment and neatly wrapped metaphors. Dimkovska careens from pop culture to refugee laments in poems that traverse global trends.

From the intersection of boundaries, Macedonian poet and novelist Lidija Dimkovska scrutinizes life's customary and trivial details to expose the consequences—both confusing and edifying—of living in an age of contradictory ethics. These poems are packed with unusual connections and surprising detail, and populated with family characters as well as Bruno Schultz, Laurie Anderson, and George Steiner. Bilingual presentation, with Macedonian en face.

From "Ideal Weight":

Our river can be seen only through a small basement window.

And nobody dies absolutely any more. The middle-class scrapes

the price tags off presents, decorates windows with laser stars, plays shadow theatre

with rubber gloves on. It makes faces at you as you cry:

"I exorcise zombies professionally! Be free again!"

from Projection

But I know that you know how your palms itch when you're alone,

when the electricity goes off,

and the silence whirls in your stomach.

I know that you know how hard it is

to dress in white after wearing black,

to have your arms not merge into the day

but be signs by the road,

and to have nobody, Laurie, nobody travel

down your roads.

Lidija Dimkovska, Do Not Awaken Them with Hammers, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2006.

The first English-language edition of the sensational young Macedonian poet Lidija Dimkovska. Translated into English by Ljubica Arsovska and Peggy Reid and published in a facing-page, bilingual edition as part of UDP's Eastern European Poets Series. "The rock of translation is broken into stones, lined up and moved around to form a solid multitextured dwelling that Lidija Dimkovska then smashes apart with the authority of pure existentialist 21st century hard-earned riotous despair. Long live the stone-throwers! They make poetry much greater than the sum of its parts" - Fanny Howe

"Sad, silly and fantastical: in her first poetry collection translated into English (after three previous collections, plus a novel, in her native Macedonian) Dimkovska pins readers to the wall with rapid-fire linguistic energy and the propulsion of her chosen form, the jagged, long-lined column. In this forceful translation, Dimkovska takes on love (there is a cryptic "A." who is often addressed), marriage, fertility, beauty ("[he] refreshes himself with L'Oreal / (because he's worth it) to exhaustion"), religion ("God is a polyglot. God nibbles at himself thus penetrating into / the word God"), Aristotle and, of course, poetry itself. The political realities of being a contemporary woman in Eastern Europe haunt the whole collection, as in "Decent Girl": "I'll wear embroidered blouses from the Ethnographic Museum / of Macedonia, and someone will have to pay for them." Although Dimkovska's distinctive zip does, at times, get lost in the prose-like quality of some of her lines, this collection is mostly exhilarating. "I will confess," Dimkovska writes, "that art is not—but should be— / a delight." As deep and complex as they are hilarious, these poems are powerfully delightful." - Publishers Weekly

Poet and novelist Lidija Dimkovska was born in 1971 in Macedonia and she earned a doctoral degree in Romanian literature in Bucharest. She has published six books of poetry and one novel; her work has been translated into twenty languages. Dimkovska lives and teaches in Ljubljana, Slovenia.