Multiverse: New and Selected Poems

Tzveta Sofronieva is the author of poems, stories, essays and lyric installations. She writes in German, Bulgarian and English. Her most recent books of poetry include Landscapes, Shore, Anthroposcene, Selected Affordable Studio Apartments, and her previous collection in English, A Hand Full of Water which was winner of the Cliff Becker Book Prize in Translation. Trained as a physicist and historian of science she brings these sensibilities and knowledge into her poetry.She was born in 1963 in Sofia, Bulgaria, and lives today, after stays in many countries, in Berlin, Germany.Jennifer Kwon Dobbs is an award-winning American poet and the author of two books of poetry and two chapbooks, most recently Interrogation Room, Currently an associate professor of creative writing and program director of Race and Ethnic Studies at St. Olaf College, she lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

“Tzveta Sofronieva’s Multiverse: New and Selected Poems is an absolutely remarkable achievement. Scholar and poet Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, the volume’s exemplary editor (this collection reflects four decades of poetry), notes in her superb introduction that Sofronieva’s multilingualism, as well as her training as a physicist and in the philosophy of science, has allowed her to create poems that defy both literary (and linguistic) borders and our conventional sense of fixed boundaries between disciplines. This work is protean and intellectually liquid, iridescent in its fragments and radically innovative in its project of producing constructions/constellations of lyric materiality. This is a wildly provocative collection that explodes the habitual verse of our moment even as it maps a possible trajectory into our literary future.”— David St. John“Tzveta Sofronieva’s New and Selected Poems is indeed a Multiverse—one that expands to contain Europe, North America, modernity, mundanity, motherhood, and mythology. One poem proclaims, “Simultaneity interests me— / my first idea of time comes from theoretical physics”; another declares, “You are / not only yourself, but also your own opposite I.” Sofronieva opens worlds through her explorations of language, geography, and time. Read this collection, and prepare to become a newer, better version of yourself.”—Shaindel Beers, author of Secure Your Own Mask, Finalist for the Oregon Book Award“What is there left for a woman to say after Akhmatova?” asks a character in one of Tzveta Sofronieva’s early poems. This book, this Multiverse, answers that question with breathtaking brilliance. A treasure-hoard of language and languages, formally innovative and powerfully wide-ranging in its subject matter, Multiverse: New and Selected Poems disrupts boundaries of all kinds, “rejecting the whole concept of exclusion.” In language that is both sophisticated and direct, Sofronieva has given us an entire world in verse—a world of science and myth, a world that contains both Schopenhauer and the Talking Heads, a world that is resplendent in its wisdom.”—Gail Wronsky