Night Is More Abstract

Miklavž 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 Petrović Njegoš, Ezra Pound, César Vallejo, Djuna Barnes, Fernando Pessoa, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Alejandra Pizarnik. Komelj has received many Slovenian national literary awards, including the Prešeren Foundation Award, the Veronika Award, the Jenka Award, the Rožančev Award, the Župančič 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 Miklavž 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.

“I congratulate you on Hippodrome. A magnificent book! I am thrilled. Such keenness, such power and range. I bought it just before leaving for Civitella Ranieri, popped by Sansepolcro, and then read Hippodrome on a park bench… I am utterly thrilled that such a magnificent book has come out.” — Tomaž Šalamun, from a letter to the author“…it is precisely because of all this complexity and range that Hippodrome is a beautiful, rewarding text filled with consideration and devoid of pretense, crafted by a true modernist seeking not to outwit nor befuddle the reader, but to enrich and embolden.” — Open Poetry Books