This collection of poems is a glimpse into the lives lived on the margins, where the laws put in place to protect basic rights and bodily autonomy cease to apply.
"I see myself as someone whose organic inquiry and teaching are shaped by radical love, and I am willing to let myself be changed by my students."
The dynamic taking place in these poems was autoethnography, a hybrid of my investigation of the 1960's coupled with my personal experience.
I’d take the past and make it straight, Even though it’s complicated, We’ve got time to start again, I don’t know if you can hear me…
"One can’t write poetry without love. It is the strongest and the most vital root in poetry."
You will find ten poems by ten Albanian poets (mostly women poets) from Kosovo and Albania and our diaspora, translated into English by me.
"The AutoEthnographer is committed to diversity, equity, & inclusion in its administration; support of emerging authors and artists; & celebration of creative expression as a vehicle for shared understanding & positive change."
The otherness is not somewhere out there. It’s in me. Still, my search did not stop to this discovery. It took me profoundly even further. It took me to love and poetry.
I offer the following five poems to you. I hope that when you read/hear them you see a way into your own stories and ideas of poetic voice.
There are multiple approaches to find one's poetic voice depending on the lens one chooses as a part of the author’s creative process.
Within the context of this poem, I tried to explain what was happening to my body because of SLE and what I was thinking.
Through all of the things that separate us, there is one universal experience that transcends all barriers: love.