Emergency Exit

by Xhevdet Bajraj, Ani Gjika (Translator), Alice Whitmore (Translator)

How does a writer translate war? And when the war is over, how does the individual reconstruct his world from the ruins? Bajraj lives in Mexico, in exile since the war in Kosovo, and a lot of his poetry is equally attentive to both the desire and the loneliness inherent in that fate. —Ani Gjika (translator)

Bajraj’s poems capture the troubled voice of the foreigner in a strange land; a place tethered, painfully and inextricably, to the past. Bajraj’s Mexico City, populated by fallen angels and the ghosts of the poet’s war-torn past, is an uneasy place, one in which even the most mundane of activities is tinged with darkness. Visions of violence intermittently break the flow of words, rendered all the more forceful by their sparse simplicity. This selection of short poems, like small windows into a world in which neither the reader nor the poet is entirely at ease, allow us to contemplate the brutal melancholy of war, exile, and their lingering effects. —Alice Whitmore

55 pages, Paperback

Published April 23, 2020

About the author

Xhevdet Bajraj is an ethnic Albanian Kosovar poet and screenwriter now residing in Mexico. Bajraj was granted residency in Mexico as a refugee thanks to the International Parliament of Writers that offered him the options of France, Italy or Mexico.