Overview

In Called by Distances, Biljana D. Obradović looks back at a life that includes surviving the demise of her native country of Yugoslavia, the loss of her parents in the same year, and displacement from Hurricane Katrina. Her poetry encompasses loves and deaths, international travels and adjustments to American culture, often accompanied by a feeling of not belonging anywhere. What emerges from these richly evocative poems is a portrait of an artist who resists the call to assimilate, and instead carves her own unique path, continuing to dream.

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9780807185865

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Reviews

""Called by Distances travels through New Orleans and around the world in poems that gain their lyric impulse through narrative exactitude. 'We had to wear masks, not for romance / but to protect ourselves from the invisible,' writes Biljana D. Obradović, who commits to writing it as she sees it so we might see what is not there! This book is one of a kind."" - Jericho Brown ""Driven by a brilliant worldliness, and by an urgency of witness, Obradović's new poems are stunning in their uncanny ability to resurrect language itself from the mundane. These are 'true' poems in that old way, and fine."" - Bruce Weigl ""I have long admired Obradović's poems for their frankness, their downright bluntness. She can see straight through hypocrisy and mass delusion, and she is never afraid to point it out. In this collection, for the first time, she turns her merciless eye upon herself and her adventures as a perpetual international wanderer, native of a country (Yugoslavia) that no longer exists. 'Transform? Blend in? // That's the last thing I want,' she declares. She need not worry, for her distinct poetic voice stands out and makes for a compelling, refreshing read."" - Julie Kane

Author Information

Biljana D. Obradović is a Serbian-American poet, translator, critic, and professor of English at Xavier University of Louisiana. She has published collections of original poems, including Little Disruptions, poetry translations, and anthologies of work by contemporary Serbian writers.

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