From Sarajevo With Sorrow

Goran Simic: Goran Simic was born in Bosnia in 1952 and has been living in Toronto since 1996. He has published eleven books of poetry, drama, and short fiction, including the acclaimed volume of poems in English translation, Sprinting from the Graveyard (Oxford University Press, 1997). In Canada, Simic has published Peace and War, a limited edition volume gathering poems by himself and by Fraser Sutherland; other books of his poetry and drama have been translated into nine languages. His poems are included in anthologies of world poetry, such as Scanning the Century (Penguin, 2002) and Banned Poetry (Index, 1997). He has received major literary awards from PEN USA and four times in former Yugoslavia. Amela Simic: Amela Simic is a translator and writer. Her translations from English of works by Susan Sontag, Bernard Malamud, Sylvia Plath, Joyce Carol Oates, Joseph Heller, Saul Bellow, Michael Ondaatje and Lawrence Darrell, among others, have appeared in various literary magazines of the former Yugoslavia. She has also translated several novels and works by contemporary philosophers. Her essays and translations of Bosnian poetry have appeared in Salmagundi, TLS, The Paris Review, Canadian Forum, Meta, and BBC Radio. She is currently the Executive Director of Playwrights Guild of Canada and lives in Toronto.

"The poetry in From Sarajevo, With Sorrow is at turns anecdotal, hectoring, and coolly visionary. It's all written in the first person, sometimes in Simic's own voice and sometimes as dramatic monologue, but there's nothing introverted about it. Its voice is one of witness rather than confession."&#8212Good Reports "Besides the cold bare facts of war, Simic's poems...are full of the hallucinatory facts of paranoid nightmares bred by war."&#8212Zach Wells