Soiled with Earth, Drunk on Air

Description

Plants are the protagonists in Soiled With Earth, Drunk On Air, Sibila Petlevski’s self-translated poetry collection written between 2019 and 2020. This collection is a libretto for whispering to magical herbs and listening to the voices of silence. In many ways, these poems predicted the fear and isolation of the global pandemic lockdown, while also offering up a strategy to overcome these hardships through understanding people as a part of nature. These are verses for the ecology of the spirit.

Read Petlevski’s thoughts on self-translation at Literary Hub.

Sibila Petlevski is the author of twenty-three fiction, nonfiction, drama, and poetry books. She is a member of l’Académie Européenne de Poésie; PEN International, serving two mandates on the PEN International board (2002–2007); the Association of the Women of the Mediterranean Region; and the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Her work has received numerous awards, including the Vladimir Nazor Annual National Prize for Literature and Arts (1993) and the Crystal Vilenica award (2021); her play Eisgeneral was selected at Berliner Festspiele TT Stückemarkt (2005); and she received the first Poeteka International Poetry Prize (2005). In 2024, the Croatian edition of Soiled with Earth, Drunk on Air won the Željko Sabol Award for the best collection of poems in the Croatian language.