Selected Poems

Luljeta Lleshanaku is one of Eastern Europe’s most distinct poetry voices. At a young age, she witnessed the political changes that swept through Albania, that sudden jolt of time and space that catapulted her generation into a world without future nor steady anchor. Lleshanaku’s poems are direct and steeped in melancholy – whether she returns home, to a time of secret prayers and books read in secret, or she dissects the anonymity of layover flights to describe the constant division between body and soul, for in our frantic, quick world ‘the body can no longer feel nostalgia’.