30 Questions People Don't Ask: The Selected Poems of Inga Gaile (Pleiades Press Translation)

Poetry. Translated from the Latvian by Leva Lešinska. "The poems of Inga Gaile offer an urgent and at times mythic vision of the self trapped inside the claustrophobic press of history, nature, technology, and conflict. And yet the speaker's tone is often conversational, casual--even as she remains steadfast in her desire to right the world (no matter how impossible that task might be). Just when the poems begin to feel timeless and elemental--built of snow, blood, beasts, sex, and violence--an iPhone shows up to locate us clearly in our present moment. This work is deeply original, virtuosic in its use of metaphor and its complex engagement with global politics, and utterly of the 21st century--born of a hopeful longing for meaningful human connection coupled with a suspicion that such connection has too often become impossible." --Wayne Miller

"Inga Gaile's poems re-center subjects of feminism and gender. The collection is a haunting of Zirgu Pasts, myths of half-child bears, voices of buried daughters in relentless lines of heart-beating rhythm and no-nonsense questions digging into protest. Repetition becomes the site of trauma and recovery. The poems perform tragedy on stages of forest churches and icy tongues. Between daughters and mothers and grandmothers, the poems show life as it exists, as both miracle and fog. It is with mathematical precision that she unfurls wounds of history, criticizes emotional sincerity, and complicates witness and testimony." --E.J. Koh

Inga Gaile is an award-winning poet, novelist, playwright and theater director. She has published four collections of poetry, two collections of poetry for children, four plays, and one novel. She has won the Latvian Literature Award and the prize from the Poetry Days Festival in Latvia, among many other honors. In English, her work has been featured in international journals such as Pleaides, Drunken Boat, and Edinburgh Review, and in the anthology New European Poets. She regularly performs her poetry at international festivals, such as The Hay Festival and the London Book Fair. Her poems have been translated into Bengali, English, German, Lithuanian, Spanish and Swedish, and she has translated the work of Russian-speaking poets into Latvian. She lives in Riga, Latvia.