Poetry of love and passion for language, a desire to understand it and an attempt to show how language holds us with its power.

Poetry

The starting point of this collection consists of two of the most common types of lyric poetry which are deeply rooted in the literary tradition – love and nature. But it is only a floor plan, so to speak, because motifs and themes are not the main thing in this collection, the main thing is the language itself and its infinite possibilities. Olga Stehlíková shows how through words and linguistic expression we relate to events, situations, people and things…

This collection is not a linguistic laboratory where sterile experiments take place; but on the contrary, it is a set of poems behind which we always feel an authentic experience, a real life story that finally took the form of a text and ended up on paper. The author does not tell the stories of the characters or even her own stories, but she tells the story of a language that has to go through so many different situations while always serving the purposes that are given to it from the outside. In Olga Stehlíková’s poems, it is as if one could breathe out for a moment, take a break and express oneself, showing complicity in what we call reality and what we usually consider as an objective fact – but half of it is actually linguistic.

Olga Stehlíková works as a freelance writer, editor and critic with a focus on contemporary Czech literature. She has edited dozens of books of poetry and prose for various Czech publishing houses and her own poetry has appeared in many Czech and foreign literary magazines, including Modern Poetry in Translation and Versopolis Review. Her debut collection Týdny (Weeks, 2014) won the 2015 Magnesia Litera Award for poetry. Her second collection Vejce/Eggs (Couplets, 2017), was released along with an LP with Tomáš Braun’s music. Her third book of poetry was Vykřičník jak stožár (Exclamation Mark High as a Pole, 2018) and her latest is Zkouška Sirén (Siren Test, 2022).