Šteger, Aleš: The Book of Bodies

Translated by Brian Henry (White Pine Press, paperback)

Publication Date: May 10, 2022

Publisher Marketing: The poems in Aleš Šteger’s The Book of Bodies roam across personal experience, human history, and the natural world to unlock intellectual and emotional connections.

Aleš Šteger’s The Book of Bodies directly follows—and builds on and veers from—The Book of Things. The 50 poems in The Book of Things focus on such everyday objects as umbrellas, chairs, and candles, and in so doing illuminate the human condition, particularly its propensity for violence, deception, and forgetting. The 50 poems in The Book of Bodies manage to be simultaneously more and less restrictive: half the poems are prose poems (of five paragraphs each) that roam across personal experience, human history (individual and collective), and the natural world to unlock intellectual and emotional connections; the other half are narrow stanzaless poems that focus on a single word. These poems have a sinuous, almost vaporous quality on the page—lines so thin that they serve as a response to the prose that dominates the first half of the book. Both types of poems in The Book of Bodies are essential to Šteger’s understanding of the world.

“Esteemed American readers, Aleš Šteger is the real thing! He is the poet of inimitable gifts! He is one of the best Eastern European poets of his generation! It is the truth: Šteger is a marvelous voice, one that takes some of the playfulness of his Yugoslavian compatriots Vasko Popa and Tomaž Šalamun to the whole new level.”
— Ilya Kaminsky