There’s the hand and there’s the arid chair by Tomaž Šalamun and translated by the author with Joshua Beckman

This is poetry from Slovenia.

There’s the hand and there’s the arid chair by Tomaž Šalamun translated by the author with Joshua Beckman is published by Counterpath Press. This is a Book originally written in Slovenian. This was published in 2009.0 and has the ISBN of 9.781933996127E12.

There’s the hand and there’s the arid chair, by Tomaž Šalamun, is a Slovenian poetry collection from Slovenia, translated by the author with Joshua Beckman, published by Counterpath Press in 2009. It is a Slovenian collection by Tomaž Šalamun where object, body, and desert-dry absurdity meet. The title feels like a stage direction from a dream: hand here, chair there, meaning somewhere refusing to behave. I would not ask the reader to solve this book before feeling it. The better invitation is to start with the image that will not quite explain itself, then follow the pressure of cadence, silence, and address. For this library, the book matters as more than a representative entry from Slovenia. It gives English-language readers another route into how poetry travels: not as a tidy report from elsewhere, but as a living encounter with local weather, historical pressure, and the privacy of a voice.

If you’d like to see international poetry continue and gain traction, consider requesting this work from your local library, or purchasing it from places like Open Books (a poetry only bookstore), Asterism Books (an independent press distributor), or bookshop.org to connect you with your local bookstores.

Check out more of the always in-progress translated poetry index here.