Burning Tongues

A selection of new and previously published poems from a key voice in the new generation of central European post-Communist poets.

Aleš Šteger's poetry is multi-layered and technically versatile, ingenious and inventive, adventurous and playful yet serious in intention, and above all, incessantly curious in its investigations which the reader is invited to share – and he loves to ambush the reader with the unexpected.

Notable for its moral engagement, his poetry is acutely precise in its observation and concentration, and could also be described – in very broad terms – as surrealist. His influences are mainly European, most notably the Serbian master poet Vasko Popa and the French surrealist Francis Ponge, whose mantle he could be said to have taken on in prose poems which describe everyday objects in minute terms, only to explode in the imagination through what he perceives in them.