sympathy for the salami

Milena Markovic is a city poet who revels in the crumbling concrete and smoked meat of Belgrade and other European metropolises populated by the addicted, the down-and-out, the mad, and the shady. sympathy for the salami selects work from her seven poetry collections, including excerpts from her novel-in-verse Children, which encompass the full range of her humor and terror. Her poems present a blemished nakedness in their candor about her drug-and-alcohol-fueled music scene days and their aftermath, as well as her life as a mother to a son with intellectual disabilities. Motifs of substance abuse, an unabashed love of meat, the dailiness of European urban life, childhood trauma, haunted dreamscapes, and the demands of motherhood permeate the work, steeped in the intricacies of Balkan culture. Readers of American poets as diverse as Anne Sexton and Charles Bukowski will find Markovic's confessional voice, while readers of Charles Simic will chuckle over her humorous voltas, fans of surrealism will feel at home in her dreamscapes, and Frank O'Hara devotees will appreciate her fresh portrayals of European urban dailiness.

In sympathy for the salami, we hear a vivid, honest, often funny, sometimes disturbing voice from this Serbian poet who confronts her life more directly than most of us have the courage to do. As she tells us, she writes for everyone, the living and the dead and those who won't die, and for the children who "walk in the murk," so they can find the way out of it. She herself is still in it, and she has learned that "the murk is not the worst place/the end is not the worst place/fear is." Whether she is describing wild parties or delirium tremens, a love affair or her grandfather grabbing his granddaughters behind the house, even her ambivalent feelings toward the disabled son to whom she gave birth when she was not much more than a child, she remains fearless. At times, the rush of language and the bohemian scenes remind me of Frank O'Hara, at other times her despair makes me think of Billie Holiday greeting her heartbreak. But Milena Markovic is very much her own self, and Maja and Steven Teref have found a muscular English to embody her voice and make us forget that she does not live just down the street.

-Susanna Lang, author of Travel Notes from the River Styx, and translator of My Soul Has No Corners by Souad Labbize