Poetry

When her debut work was published, photographer and poet Zuzana Lazarová attracted plenty of attention and was immediately nominated for the prestigious Jiří Orten Award for young writers. We have already seen some of her promise: in 2013, poetry by the then not all that well-known Lazarová appeared in the Best Czech Poetry 2013 anthology. What does she write about? Her poems definitely do not include much optimism, as the very title indicates, for an iron shirt in Czech stands for habit, but Lazarová extends the scale and sees violence where a less poetic eye would not find it. The Jiří Orten panel above all appreciated the “tension between a rational construction and a surrealistic standpoint that keeps extremes within limits.”

Praise

“The literary debut Iron Shirt cruelly reminds us how much the banal facts of everyday life bind us and what they turn us into”

— Michaela Kašičková, iLiteratura