Soiled With Earth, Drunk On Air

Plants are the protagonists in Soiled With Earth, Drunk On Air, Sibila Petlevski’s self-translated poetry collection written between 2019 and 2020. It 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 such hardships through understanding people as a part of nature. These are poems for the ecology of the spirit. Smoke You who have just started to walk Upright—you do not need a rope to hang yourself: you need it to hope for a fire as you make the bow drill rubbing two sticks of poplar wood together, searching the distance with your evergreen eyes, certain that the first one you see there will know how to blow the smoke of your confidence into flames. “Sibila Petlevski stands apart from the mainstream of Croatian literature . . . The unusual combination of her apparent desire to enter through her writing into some new and uncharted domain on one hand, and the equally readable grid constructed from language and poetical conventions on the other, in the end results in dense and yet very fluid, almost transparent, images.”—Poetry International Sibila Petlevski is the author of twenty-three fiction, nonfiction, drama, and poetry books. She is a member of l’Académie Européenne de Poésie, International PEN, serving two mandates on the International PEN Board (2002-2007), and Association of the Women of the Mediterranean Region. She has received the Vladimir Nazor Annual National Prize for Literature and Arts (1993); 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 Sabol Award for the best book in the Croatian language.