AN UNRULED BODY
In a searching and powerful debut memoir, award-winning poet and literary translator Ani Gjika tells a different kind of origin story by writing about the ways a woman listens to her own body, intuition, and desire.
Ani Gjika was born in Albania and came of age just after the fall of Communism, a time in which everyone had a secret to keep and young women were afraid to walk down the street alone. When her family immigrates to America, Gjika finds herself far from the grandmother who helped raise her, grappling with a new language, and isolated from aging parents who are trying in their own ways to survive. Then she meets a young man whose mind leans toward writing as hers does, and Ani falls in love―at least, she thinks it’s love.
Set across four countries―Albania, Thailand, India, and the U.S.―An Unruled Body tells the story of a young woman’s journey to selfhood through the lenses of language, sexuality, and identity, and how she learned to find freedom of expression on her own terms.
PRAISE FOR
AN UNRULED BODY
“In her courageous and profoundly moving memoir, Albanian-born poet and translator Ani Gjika reconstructs her personal history in Albania, America, and beyond, naming traumas that often remain unspoken. Gjika is unafraid to delve into the most taboo topic for a woman raised in a religious family within a patriarchal society: sex. The book that emerges is memorable, rich, and daring, simultaneously a portrait of Albania during the fall of communism; an exploration of language, desire, and power; and a bracingly honest sexual coming of age tale that unfolds across continents.
An Unruled Body is a different kind of origin story, one that demands that we consider the specific, insidious ways that patriarchy controls a woman’s relationship to her body, mind, and expression. With a poet’s ear, Gjika finds language for confronting misogyny and the male gaze on the most intimate terms, ultimately revealing the transformational power of self-discovery through the written word.”
—Francisco Cantú, Shuchi Saraswat, and Ilan Stavans, judges for the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing
“An Unruled Body paints a new portal of entry into the role of the nation in the multiple layers of our experiences with consent and sensuality. Ani Gjika makes us remember that these pages, and this memoir, are made for feeling our way through the chaos while making memories of pleasure and resistance.”
—Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: An American Memoir and MacArthur Fellow
“An Unruled Body compellingly draws readers along Gjika’s journey toward sexual freedom, and the experience is breathtaking. At times meditative, and at times cinematic, Gjika writes about the intricacies of patriarchy, trauma, and sex with unflinching clarity and nuance, and an embodied sense of suspense that will keep your heart pounding.”
—Jonathan Escoffery, author of If I Survive You
“Ani Gjika has written a searing reminder that history lives in the body and a love letter to the power of language to restore us to ourselves. Beautiful, impactful, and deeply moving, An Unruled Body resonates far beyond its pages.”
—Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, author of The Fact of a Body
"Readers will be impressed by the author’s bold willingness to face the horrors of her childhood as she artfully blends an insightful look at her native country’s societal issues with her own family’s immigration story and her ongoing journey to sexual health. A poignant literary and personal achievement."
— Booklist STARRED review
“The author’s poetic prowess is clearly reflected in this text’s lyrical, clean lines, as well as in her compassionate but critical analysis of every character of the story, including herself . . . . this is a gorgeously written look at a difficult topic.”
― Kirkus Reviews
“Bold, tender, intimate.”
—Nina Maclaughlin for The Boston Globe
“This lush, gorgeous, and sexy memoir is about desire hidden and finally claimed. As this brave, astonishingly talented writer and award-winning translator moves across far-flung countries and cultures, she also listens to the language of the entire world, making a home on the page—where she translates herself.”
—Aviya Kushner, author of The Grammar of God
“Although this is a memoir, An Unruled Body almost reads like it's a part Proust novel, part Szymborska / Lleshanaku / Lorca poetry collection. Immersive, imagistic and attentive to the lived life in and out of the body. Gjika investigates what can and can't be contained (in the girl, in the woman, in memory, in language, in love, sex and heartbreak). In an inspired move, Gjika creates forms and sentences that are ambitious and complex, written in the poet's clean and intentionally understated prose. Ani Gjika proves that she is more than a translator and a poet, but a survivor, a listener, an emotional historian that is daring to live with her own history as fully as she can fathom.”
—Raymond Antrobus, author of The Perseverance
“With a poet’s ear for sound and magic and rhythm, and a page-turning storytellers’ sense of narrative, Ani Gjika’s An Unruled Body is a hypnotic and ruthlessly honest account of navigating the enduring complexities of sexuality, gender, religion, and identity. This is a book the entire human race should read.”
—Matthew Vollmer, author of All of Us Together in the End
“Gjika has a voice that is precise, surprising, and wholly her own. Her writing made me think more deeply about how to live in the world and how to be more awake to sensations from without and from within. This book is a gift and a delight.”
—Alysia Abbott, author of Fairyland
“With a poet’s eye for detail, Ani Gjika invites her readers into the intricacies of a life, making us feel as if we are experiencing the story in real time alongside her. The voice in An Unruled Body is brave, raw and immediate. If prose is the vehicle that carries the narrative, poetry is the heart and soul that feeds the imagination in this memoir. From a writer who learned English by memorizing Emily Dickinson’s opening lines, comes a book that we will want to commit to memory and return to many times over.”
—Eve Joseph, author of In the Slender Margin and Canadian winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize
“With tiny verses of poetry springing into the story like budding bouquets, An Unruled Body is a memoir about language, love, and the echo of generations that’s both uncommonly intimate and boldly kaleidoscopic. Gjika unpacks the thorny riddle of living in a body with such care and precision, yet still shows her reader a vast, teeming, and achingly beautiful world. What a thrill to read.”
—Mike Scalise, author of The Brand New Catastrophe
PRAISE FOR
BREAD ON RUNNING WATERS
“Ani Gjika has created penetrating, alert and elegant poems that successfully bring her unique voice to English—a language of mixed, tangled roots, perennially renewed by spirits like hers. Her poems suggest new realities and new imaginings that defy familiar notions about our old, central story of immigration to the United States.”
—Robert Pinsky, former United States Poet Laureate
“Contrary to traditional Albanian poetry, Ani Gjika's poetry is rich in narrative style and an attention to detail which makes reading her work a rewarding and intimate act. In Gjika's work we find a softened version of irony, or lack of a purposely critical tone, which distinguishes her style from that of many American poets. The element that unifies her work is precisely the tenderness with which she approaches reality, but a tenderness without sentimentality."
—Luljeta Lleshanaku, author of Negative Space
“Bread on Running Waters is a fine thing — a beautifully made book; Ani Gjika comes across as a real poet. Her metaphors….seem to come from a real place.”
—Mark Halliday, author of Jab
“How does a stranger through language reach inside your chest to crush or cradle your heart? And with such little material as a few words? What other art form is so powerful? Ani Gjika is a crucial and original voice and translator across two languages.”
—Sean Thomas Dougherty, author of The Second O of Sorrow and All You Ask For Is Longing
BREAD ON RUNNING WATERS INTRODUCTION BY
AMERICAN POET AND SCHOLAR
ROSANNA WARREN
Ani Gjika has managed a feat of tact in these poems recalling a harsh childhood in Albania and a peripatetic life that has taken her to India, Thailand, and to citizenship in the United States.
Other poems in the book delicately register the ebb and flow of feelings in a marriage, with equal tact. In the Communist Albania evoked here, danger looms: from hunger, cold, political surveillance, the threat of execution. Quietly the child’s perceptions inflect the adult poems. Just as quietly the poems of adult life, anxiety, and loss keep their balance. “Inarticulate,” which opens the collection, presents a scene of people getting off a bus in a mountain valley to drink from a stream: “I never dream of it/but I remember being watched/ as I stood at the edge of the water/ stirring images with my foot.” As the poems progress and expand this portrait of the recollected world, the sense of being watched grows more sinister: “Each family eavesdropped on the next like clockwork,” we learn from “White Noise.” But the most powerful watcher here is the poet herself: the child who observed, the grown woman who remembers and records.
Gjika has turned English, her adopted language, into a subtle instrument, a beautifully judged voicing that never slides into self-pity or melodrama, never loses its cool. It is an achievement in which ethics cannot be distinguished from poetic style. The justness of Gjika’s phrasing has everything to do with her exact and trustworthy weighing of justice, the unspoken norms of decency that stand, immensely implied, in the background of these poems whether set in or out of Albania. In “The Winter of my Childhood,” one of the key poems of the book, the child draws stars while “Politics on TV scratched at the screen,” and freezing weather menaces the family:
That year winter threatened our small house.
I heard winds howl, but I had drawn enough stars
to burn in the stove to keep us warm.
With similar reticence, in “White Noise,” a poem mostly concerned with details of domestic life, a one-line stanza coolly declares, “Nobody I loved was taken into the woods and shot.”
In “Inarticulate,” Gjika showed us a snapshot of herself as a child at the edge of water, “stirring images with my foot.” She stirs images throughout these pages; her metaphoric, metamorphic imagination roils the poems to an intensity that the tone keeps pressing back down. That conflict gives her art its essential charge. Her world is animate, almost Ovidian. Watch these transformations: “I believe a river caught up with us” (“Inarticulate”). “India runs away the moment I arrive,” and “Drums so loud/ they beat a god inside me” (“Last Day,” from “India: Three Poems). “It’s raining again, a chain stitch/ unraveling on my windshield/ a form of writing you understand” (“Passageway”). Her diction and syntax are clear and direct, an almost transparent medium in which images and story are revealed, “developed” like photographic film in the darkroom.
The subject matter taking shape here is often violent or sensual, or both. In one of the Albanian poems, children “…awoke in spring, our bodies// overgrown with weeds. Our parents/ had no idea how to save us” (“The Winter of my Childhood”). In “Children Story,” a retarded boy named Çimi who has been abandoned by his mother and eats ants sets a cat on fire with gasoline and watches “the mad cat dance.” Girls sneak into their mother’s bedroom, borrow her necklaces, and slide them over their vaginas: “What the older one keeps thinking of/ is their mother wearing these necklaces/ afterwards—the smell of her sex/ rising and falling on a woman’s chest” (“Little Women”).
Gjika carries these virtues of clarity and startling imagination into the poems set in other countries and in adult life. The third section, “Portrait of a Couple on the Grass,” takes its title from her poem inspired by a photograph of George and Mary Oppen in which the balance observed between the man and wife in the picture (“so that one’s weight never cancels the other’s”) seems an ars poetica for Gjika’s own work. The Oppens in “Portrait of a Couple on the Grass” and Vallejo and his unnamed bride-wife-widow in the poem “His Wife” create a context for the scenes of the poet’s marriage under the stress of the husband’s unemployment, depicted here with affection, sorrow, perturbation, and stoic calm. In the charged atmosphere Gjika has created, each simple object acquires the force of symbol with no explanatory intervention. On the unemployed husband’s neat desk, this poignant printed statement accompanies a recent battery order: “no special instructions necessary/ for rebuilding”—in a life that urgently requires rebuilding.
Ani Gjika’s book follows a gentle narrative arc from her Albanian childhood, her life in India and Thailand, to accommodation to life with all its immigrant difficulties in the New England. It is also a life in her adopted poetic language, in which the sound of a commuter train becomes a promise of composition and integration: “Whistles weeeeeave weave weeeeave…”
(“Location”). She has made this language her own in poems beautifully woven in a design of great depth of feeling and intelligence.
NEGATIVE SPACE
BY LULJETA LLESHANAKU
TRANSLATED BY ANI GJIKA
“Language arrived fragmentary / split in syllables / spasmodic / like code in times of war,” writes Luljeta Lleshanaku in the title poem to her powerful new collection Negative Space. In these lines, personal biography disperses into the history of an entire generation that grew up under the oppressive dictatorship of the poet’s native Albania. For Lleshanaku, the “unsaid, gestures” make up the negative space that “gives form to the woods / and to the mad woman―the silhouette of goddess Athena / wearing a pair of flip-flops / and an owl on top of a shoulder.” It is the negative space “that sketched my onomatopoeic profile / of body and shadow in an accidental encounter.” Lleshanaku instills ordinary objects and places―gloves, used books, acupuncture needles, small-town train stations―with subtle humor and profound insight, as a child discovering a world in a grain of sand.
