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.

With the direst laugh-out-loud sense of humor around, Dimkovska’s swaggering and prosey poems take on the sorrows of love ('tell me why you left me and married my sister'), God ('who does not exist . . . I’m afraid of his great eyes'), and anxiety ('I am not afraid of Virginia Woolf, / I fear Lidija Dimkovska. Have you heard of her?')—and that’s in just one poem. This first English translation...culls from four books previously published in her home country of Macedonia, and her translators, Arsovka and Reid, have rendered the poet’s irony and insistence with a smirk discernable from a mile away. [...] Dimkovska treats feminism, suicidal thoughts, the Russian Nobel Prize-winning poet Joseph Brodsky, and sex ('Oh, the monster knows that my sex is my cellar') with the same stunning capacity to transform the ridiculous into something poignant and utterly precise […] The results are transcendent, dizzying, and not to be missed.

[...] Dimkovska skillfully manages vocal / tonal shifting, humor, thematic texturing, and intimate gestures to engage the reader. [...] Dimkovska’s method of 'metaonomatopoeia' combines Levertov’s sense of capturing the feeling, tone, and texture of experience, and Marinetti’s idea of embodying complex and the mysterious motions of consciousness to create a 'psychic onomatopoetic harmony' (Dimkovska’s 'metachirp'). This difficult compositional method allows the reader to 'read read read.' [...] A dynamic, poetic voice streams through this collection in surprising and unexpected ways. The reader never knows if the poet will provide us with hypotactic grounding, or lift our perception across a paratactic paradise.