Kindness Separates Night From Day

Overview

In Kindness Separates Night From Day, Marija Dejanovic “looks at herself from a distance until she recognizes herself.” This collection is a marvel of refined verse that explores the concept of the eternal stranger: the self. As a deeply perceptive witness with a passion for reflection, Dejanovic’s ideas unfold and bloom throughout as memory and history surface in the present, and recast it, to awaken readers from the slumber of self-evident happiness and make clear with crystalline imagery the beneficial truths of harsh realities.

Reviews

“Marija Dejanović’s poems are chapters of an unwritten novel. Or chapters of life. Written with great talent, but also with an equally great stake in life, these poems send an important message and lesson to the distant galaxy: there are no bigger differences than small differences, we are truly different only from those who are very close to us. Gentle, scary, and universal poetry.” —Miljenko Jergović, Author of Kin

"Themes of isolation and transience simmer throughout, as Dejanović effectively captures the sense of otherness." —Poetry Foundation

Author Biography

Marija Dejanovic was born in Prijedor, Bosnia and Herzegovina, in 1992. She grew up in Croatia, Sisak, and currently lives between Zagreb, Croatia, and Larissa, Greece. She studied Comparative literature and Pedagogy at the University of Zagreb. In 2018, Ethics of Bread and Horses (Etika kruha i konja) won the Goran award and the Kvirin award; in 2019, Heartwood (Središnji god) won the Zdravko Pucak. In 2021, her third book, Kindness Separates Night From Day (Dobrota razdvaja dan i noc) was shortlisted for Croatia’s biggest poetry award, Tin Ujevic and the regional award Avdina Okarina.

Vesna Maric was born in Mostar Bosnia-Herzegovina, in 1976 and left at sixteen as part of a convoy of refugees. She went on to work for the BBC World Service and now writes Lonely Planet travel guides, translates literary fiction and non-fiction from Croatian into English, and writes a variety of journalism for publications including the Guardian. Maric's memoir, Bluebird, was published by Granta in 2009, and was longlisted for The Orwell Prize; her first novel, The President Shop, was published by Sandorf Passage in 2021.