Opera Buffa

Slovenian poet <>Tomaž Šalamun (1941-2014) is hailed as one of the most prominent poets of his generation, renowned for his impact on the Eastern European avant-garde movement. He published more than fifty books of poetry in his native Slovenian and his work has been translated into more than twenty languages around the world, numbering over eighty volumes. His books include Druids, Justice, and Andes, all three also published by Black Ocean. Matthew Moore is a poet, translator, and editor. His poetry appears widely in literary journals, including Fence, Interim, Lana Turner, Second Stutter, and West Branch. He lives in Boulder, Colorado.

"This volume is gracefully unified by its commitment to enjambment as a way of rendering familiar narratives suddenly and wonderfully strange. As the book unfolds, the work is increasingly inhabited by silence, which amplifies the surreal and often disconcerting moments in each intricately imagined dreamscape. Šalamun provocatively places the line in tension with the sentence, allowing suspense to accumulate and undermining expectations of narrative resolution. Šalamun’s poems are as subversive in their craft as they are in their thinking, and this translation preserves that originality of thought and expression."—Publishers Weekly, starred review, on Druids by Tomaž Šalamun"...Tomazˇ Šalamun,the avant-garde Slovenian poet who called the poems in this book 'the most possessed and insane he had written,' was also using thephrase 'opera buffa' to goof on 'opera buff.' That’s the spirit of thisbook, consisting of mostly (but for three short poems) Šalamuniansonnets—seven couplets, with short, usually enjambed lines. This isthe fourth book of Šalamun poetry published by Black Ocean (Andes,Justice, and Druids), and while a posthumous publication, it displaysŠalamun at his most playful—and that’s saying something."—John Bradley, rain taxi