The Book of Visits

Hard to categorize, impossible to ignore, Dinko Telećan’s The Book of Visits engages the world apace with the comings and goings of nature, those we love, and those we will never know. In the smallest of details—from the blooming of flowers to the angles of buildings and fleeting glances between two people—Telećan’s work illuminates the universal elements of existence in fresh and unforgettable ways. A VIST TO YOU You always open a different door. Which is why I must be different, yet the same. And nothing must ossify. A mask crumpled in a pocket. Organs fished out of formaldehyde. And you, as never before, no one, nothing before or after. Every time you surrender yourself to a different sense. So many of them still need to be invented. The tongue is one and only and sufficient. All that’s been said still needs to come into being. Every time a new door and a different glimmer of your face. The I is too little to see you. Too few hands for all the handles. I’ll run, keep watch, circle, and enter. And I’ll know that it’s always too little. Until that one time. And that one time—hasn’t it already happened a hundred times? Be that as it may, I brace myself to knock, my face flushed. And my fingers turn white, white from clenching, from the fear that only a fraction of you will be touched. Dinko Telećan was born in 1974 in Zagreb, Croatia. In 1999, he graduated with a degree in Philosophy and English language and literature from the University of Zagreb. Since then, he has been writing poetry, prose, and essays, as well as translating from English, Spanish, Chinese, and Slovenian. He has published seven books of poems (Clashes, 1997; Gardens & Red Phase, 2003; Beyond, 2005; Needlestack, 2011; Until Your Eyes Burn Off, 2017; Sufficient Reasons and Other Poems, 2021; and The Book of Visits, 2023), the metaphysical study Freedom and Time (2003), the travelogues Lotus, Dust and Poppy (2008), Asian Suite (2015), and Three Distances (2025), the book of essays The Desert (2009) and the novel Deserter (2013). Selections from his works have been translated into Albanian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Czech, English, Galician, German, Greek, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Romanian, Slovakian, Slovenian, and Spanish. The Book of Visits is the first of his books to be translated into English.