Cat Painters: An Anthology of Contemporary Serbian Poetry

Biljana D. Obradović and Dubravka Djurić, Eds.
(Diálogos Books of Lavender Ink, 2016)

What Dubravka Djurić & Biljana Obradović have done in Cat Painters is to produce an anthology-as-assemblage, a dynamic composition that offers in its own right a new poetry & poetics that can now enrich our own sense of what’s still possible in poetry. The range of the poems presented here is remarkable, a true avant-garde moment as a reflection of the turbulent times from which it comes. Far from being a gathering of the already known, it is, like the best & rarest of our anthologies, an opening to a treasury of language (word & image) that one could hardly have imagined before this. But the sighting, once it occurs, will not soon be forgotten.