Join us as we count down to ALTA41: Performance, Props, and Platforms with the National Translation Award in Poetry and Prose long- and shortlisted titles! We will be featuring the titles in alphabetical order, moving first through the longlisted and then the shortlisted titles, alongside blurbs penned by our judges for the National Translation Awards in Poetry and Prose. This year’s judges for poetry are Kareem James Abu-Zeid, Jennifer Feeley, and Sawako Nakayasu, and this year’s prose judges are Esther Allen, Tess Lewis, and Jeremy Tiang.

For quick reference, you may find the NTA longlists here, and the NTA shortlists here. Today we’re shining the spotlight on Directions for Use, shortlisted for the National Translation Award in Poetry:

Directions for Use
by Ana Ristović
translated from the Serbian by Steven Teref and Maja Teref
(Zephyr Press)

Ana Ristović’s first book in English translation is long overdue – elsewhere in the world she has already found her audience. Steven Teref and Maja Teref team up to bring us this singular feminist voice in contemporary Serbian poetry, while providing crucial context to a Ristović-specific audacity tucked beneath the surfaces of what at first blush feels charming and wittily domestic. This book traffics in the “directions” and “uses” of cities, vehicles, houses, and interiorities of the body – in particular, the sensual landscapes here are disarming and fresh – “my soul sewed/a chatty vulva on me with invisible thread.”