Without Anesthesia

A major literary event, Without Anesthesia offers a generous selection of the poetry of acclaimed Slovenian writer-critic Ales Debeljak. It includes the entirety of two recent collections, Unended and Below the Waterline, which have never before been published in English, as well as significant selections from his first three collections, Anxious Moments, The City and the Child, and (in new translations) Dictionary of Silence. Writing through wars, genocide, and political upheaval, Debeljak is a poet of Slovenia, of Europe, and of the West. Courtly yet elusive, his writing, in its variety of shapes and forms, presents a contemporary world that relentlessly sweeps us up in its currents, depicting its residual traumas and surprising pleasures with aplomb.