Opera Buffa is Tomaz Salamun's last testament. It is a book rooted in torn landscapes of Central Europe and the Mediterranean. Crafted from place and power, these poems are fragments of collective memory. "There are hands, inside. Concordance rises / There are no foodstuffs. There's no branch." These are poems that examine what is tender and terrible in the world, ranging from the extrajudicial civil massacres of partisans during and after the Second World War, to the prejudicial violence carried out in twenty-first-century Europe against people forced to migrate from the Middle East, North Africa, and India. Opera Buffa witnesses anarchical plutocracy, climate catastrophe, and so much more. "Do you feel the footsteps?/ Do you feel the approach?" This is Opera Buffa.

Tomaz is an extended poem assembled from assembled by Joshua Beckman from his recorded conversations with one of the foundational figures of the European avant-garde, Tomaz Salamun. This book includes photographs and translated original poems throughout, some of which are presented for the first time in English, and it covers the first forty years of his life in his own words. With careful articulation and generosity of attention, Joshua Beckman becomes a conduit for the language of Salamun, assembling an autobiographic poem in a way that only a poet, translator, and friend could. .

Poetry. In the introduction to OUBLIETTE, Peter Richards's first book of poetry, Tomaz Salamun writes, It is inscrutable how Peter Richards produces this religious magma and bathes himself and us in it. How he restores internal time to the work of art. I don't know and I don't want to tell you about it. Get wet by yourself. Dara Wier says about OUBLIETTE, I love to read a book approaching tragedy without recourse to literal analogy. Peter Richards' poems hesitate to simplify and they get close to knowing, thus they nearly push me over the edge, then they say, don't go, not yet. They electrify the mortal story that goes - there's only one way in, one way out of this world. And then these tender poems say, let's go everywhere, maybe there's another world.

Poetry. Tomaz Salamun is perhaps the most popular and prolific poet in Central Europe today. Thanks to the translation of his work he has also been widely acclaimed abroad. To date he has had four collections of selected poetry published in English. A BALLAD FOR METKA KRASOVEC, originally published in the 1980s by Harcourt, at the mid-point of Salamun's career, is considered by the author to be one of his finest works. The volume is characterized by often striking imagery and sexual turmoil. It is the first complete single volume of his to appear in English translation. The translator is Michael Biggins, who is a Slavic and East European Studies librarian at the University of Washington Libraries in Seattle. SPD also carries Salamun's FOUR QUESTIONS OF MELANCHOLY (White Pine).

The work of this "eminent, still-wild spirit of Central Europe" ("Publishers Weekly") continues to electrify. In "The Blue Tower," language is remade with tenderness and abandon: "Rommel was kissing heaven's dainty hands and yet / from his airplane above the Sahara my uncle / Rafko Perhauc still blew him to bits." There is an effervescence and a sense of freedom to Tomaž Salamun's poetry that has made him an inspiration to successive generations of American poets, "a poetic bridge between old European roots and the American adventure" (Associated Press). Trivial and monumental, beautiful and grotesque, healing, ferocious, mad: "The Blue Tower" is an essential volume.

A new collection by the Slovenian poet, Tomaz Salamun, is always eagerly awaited, and 'Row' shows this popular and distinctive poet at the height of his powers. Translated by the American poet Joshua Beckman and the author, and presented as a bilingual edition (with Slovenian and English texts on facing pages), these are instinctive, sensory poems, poems of great power and surprise; each phrase, no matter how unexpected or surreal, has a deliberate force and a convincing relevance. Salamun is a mysterious and enigmatic poet - he takes risks, and with wit and wonder, he renews our familiar world again and again. This volume, which opens with a short preface by the translator, Joshua Beckman, forms part of the 'Arc Translations' series, edited by Dr. Jean Boase-Beier of the University of East Anglia (UK).

This newest collection of poems from Tomaž Salamun is exuberant, ambitious, and full of surprises. Here the devil is encountered and understood-
"I see the devil's head, people, I see his whole body . . . "
"he longs for innocence, as we do. "
"Here the poet juggles many tones, languages, and countries. Desire is evoked as both frustrating and exhilarating-"
"I'm watered by longing, knocking my"
"head into the wall, on the ground, or I burn, burn, "
"folded up on the couch."
"And memory comes back to remind us of the laws and experiences of childhood-"
"Once again you are let loose in the sea"
"only after five o'clock in the afternoon to take"
"a dose of sunlight like the ticking of the clock."
At once daring and clear-voiced, The Book for My Brother is an extraordinary achievement.