Tomaž Šalamun (1941) was born in the Croatian capital of Zagreb, but grew up in Slovenia, where he became a pioneer of the avant-garde in the 1960s and ’70s. Since then he has lived on and off in America. His poetry, translated into twenty languages, is both elegant and ironic. Often absurd and cruel, with an eye always fixed on some seemingly irrelevant detail, his poems grapple with history, politics and philosophy.

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