This Is Not Why You Call Your Friends in the Middle of the Night

by Евгения Динева

In this selection, Evgeniya Dineva explores perennial poetic themes with an adept hand. At the center of these poems is a yearning to revisit, to reinhabit, to relive moments of failed intimacy with family, with lovers, with society, with nature. Dineva’s Speakers remind us always that a lack of intimacy is a certain flavor of pain, but that intimacy rebuffed or misdirected is a distinct and equal trauma. The poet requires that we question why our successful intimacies fade into memory and become nostalgia, but our failed attempts haunt and become, in so many ways, our most treasured and cloistered obsessions.

Charles Fleming, AEIC — Passengers Journal


Without doubt one of the most distinguishable poetic voices in contemporary Bulgarian literature! Evgenia Dineva’s poems are like a long postponed coming home – emotionally saturated and intimate. The absorbing sense of solitude in them creates a safe home for all of us, who often feel lost and turn confusion in life “into a ritual”, while her beautiful, bright colored metaphors, like “shiny sharp objects”, surgically cut the imagination in order to stitch the mind and heal the soul.

Danila Raycheva, Writer

32 pages, ebook

First published October 24, 2024

About the author

Evgeniya Dineva is a Bulgarian writer.
She is the winner of multiple awards for fiction in her home country and poetry of hers appears in various literary journals across USA, the UK, India and Bulgaria.

Her short story collection Stasis In Pastel Blue comes out early 2023.