City of Ash (Paperback)

Although the city in the title of this sensitive collection refers to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, City of Ash serves as a universal geography of the contemporary soul in an urban context, built on the fragments of the past. Through his poetry, Eugenijus Alisanka searches for personal and historical meaning within the framework of time, recognizing both the demands of the self and the impossibility of avoiding what came before, whether human or cultural.

Lithuanian poetry is known for the melodiousness it achieves through rhyme and assonance, but Alisanka favors a more modern approach. His free verse, defying traditional capitalization and punctuation, may be read as a rebellion -- conscious or unconscious -- against the regulations imposed by the Language Commission in Lithuania, which regulates such matters. Alisanka's poems are neither surrealistic nor stream of consciousness but are, like cities themselves, concatenations of non sequiturs.