City of Ash

Although 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. 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.

"The poems feel substantial yet evanescent, grappling with metaphysical concerns of time and space in a relatively plainspoken style . . . an appealing variety of quietly surreal expressionism . . ." --Publishers Weekly

"Alisanka spins the web of haunted connections between the real and the unreal in a city that is contemporaneous even as it rises from the shards of history. This is a volume from another world that seems to speak immediately from a literary and political climate quite our own." --Tikkun

". . . poetry of distinctive voice and of supple poetic and linguistic structure . . ." --World Literature Today