Bøker av Ani Gjika

"Ani Gjika was born in Albania and came of age just after the fall of Communism, a time when everyone had a secret to keep and young women were afraid to walk down the street alone. When her family immigrates to America, Gjika finds herself far from the grandmother who helped raise her, grappling with a new language, and isolated from aging parents who are trying in their own ways to survive. When she meets a young man whose mind leans toward writing, as hers does, Ani falls in love--at least, she thinks it's love. Set across Albania, Thailand, India, and the U.S., An Unruled Body is a young woman's journey to selfhood through the lenses of language, sexuality, and identity, and how she learns to find freedom of expression on her own terms."--

*Shortlist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize*"Language arrived fragmentary / split in syllables / spasmodic / like code in times of war," writes Luljeta Lleshanaku in the title poem to her powerful new collection Negative Space. In these lines, personal biography disperses into the history of an entire generation that grew up under the oppressive dictatorship of the poet's native Albania. For Lleshanaku, the "unsaid, gestures" make up the negative space that "gives form to the woods / and to the mad woman-the silhouette of goddess Athena / wearing a pair of flip-flops / and an owl on top of a shoulder." It is the negative space "that sketched my onomatopoeic profile / of body and shadow in an accidental encounter." Lleshanaku instills ordinary objects and places-gloves, used books, acupuncture needles, small-town train stations-with subtle humor and profound insight, as a child discovering a world in a grain of sand.