Night Is More Abstract: New and Selected Poems - Paperback

by Miklavz Komelj (Author), Dan Rosenberg (Translator)

Miklavz Komelj is one of Slovenia's leading intellectuals--a poet, artist, writer, art historian, and translator--who shares his wide-ranging interests and probing mind in this second collection to appear in English. A voracious reader, he peppers his work with allusions from literature, mythology, and history, but his inspiration also comes from less likely places, like a literary tattoo on the wrist of a woman sitting near him on a bus. Here are love lyrics, political polemics, mystical verses, artistic and archival explorations, epigrammatic and philosophical poems, and long free verse experiments. With poems spanning thirty years of his career, Night Is More Abstract illuminates the breadth and richness of Komelj's vision and his country. The book is bilingual on facing pages.

Author Biography

Miklavz Komelj (b. 1973) is one of Slovenia's most prominent artist-intellectuals. A poet, writer, art historian, translator, and painter, he has published seventeen books of poetry in addition to books of fiction, essays, images, stories, scientific and scholarly monographs, books on various artists, children's literature, and more. He has co-curated several art exhibitions, and his own paintings have been featured in multiple solo exhibitions. He has also edited several collections of famous Slovenian poets and translated into Slovene books by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Petr Petrovic Njegos, Ezra Pound, César Vallejo, Djuna Barnes, Fernando Pessoa, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Alejandra Pizarnik. Komelj has received many Slovenian national literary awards, including the Preseren Foundation Award, the Veronika Award, the Jenka Award, the Rozančev Award, the Zupančič Award, and the Velenjica Award.

Dan Rosenberg is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, two chapbooks, and many individual poems in magazines such as Kenyon Review, Seneca Review, Conjunctions, and Ploughshares. He co-translated Hippodrome, by Miklavz Komelj (Zephyr Press, 2015). His poetry collections have won the American Poetry Journal Book Prize and the Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Contest, and he served in 2025 as the Tompkins County Poet Laureate. Rosenberg holds an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Georgia. He has taught literature, creative writing, and translation courses at the University of Iowa, Augustana College, the University of Georgia, Wells College, and Cornell University. Rosenberg is currently an associate professor of English at Colorado Mesa University in Grand Junction, CO.