Dejanović Marija: Dobrota razdvaja dan i noć

Marija Dejanović: Goodness separates day and night

Poems are Marija's
drops of rain, which fall on still hot ashes.
And the drops burn and the rain ignites.
The fire leaks out. Like spilled apple juice, which went to heaven for something new, unexpected.
Poems of Mary are
an empty space between the horns aimed by the hunter, where love curls up and takes shelter.
In Mary's poems, the fish go to save themselves, and to every word they say - you are a fish, you are a fish.
In Mary's poems, a night separated by kindness goes, all so that Mary can say - you know, I am from here. ~ Darko Cvijetić

With a masterfully reduced and refined poetic speech, the poet Dejanović, as she writes in one of the key poems of the collection, "looks at herself from a distance until she recognizes herself". In a concise and narrative background, this collection separates and collects the lower amalgams of memory and the present, diagnoses strange inversions (to interrupt means to begin, and to leave means to arrive) and, by breaking the bones of the obvious, it actually fixes them. So to speak, wake us up from a dogmatic slumber about self-evident happiness, about a stranger saved in Arcadia; either geographically long ago marked as such, or temporally in childhood and growing up, as those ethereal spaces of intimacy and love. As a deeply perceptive witness—in addition to her life and many others—Marija Dejanović shares with us her passion for reflection, the natural world, the being of a woman, and above all the beneficial truths about the harshness of the experience of an eternal stranger. ~ Dorta Jagić

Marija Dejanović was born in Prijedor in 1992. She grew up in Sisak. He lives and works in Zagreb and Larisa. In 2018, he published the books Ethics of Bread and Horses (Goran Award for Young Poets and Kvirin Award for Young Poets) and Središnji god (Zdravko Pucak Award). Her trilingual book Orato Osto / Visible Bone was published in Greece as part of the Athens World Poetry Festival and Versopolis, published by Poets' Circle. She received the Milo Bošković award (2021) for the poem On the way to the store, the second prize at the DiBiase Poetry contest for the poem Grandma Still Remembers My Mother Well and the Marin Držić award for 2020 for the dramatic text We don't have to talk anymore, everyone is gone. She published poems, essays and literary reviews in various magazines, anthologies and on internet portals in Croatia and abroad. Her songs have been translated into fifteen languages. She participated in numerous domestic and foreign international poetry festivals and poetry readings. She is the deputy director of the Thessalian Poetry Festival (Πανθεσσαλικό Τησταλία Ποίησης) and a member of the editorial board of the magazine Tema. She completed her studies in pedagogy at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb. The study of comparative literature at the same faculty almost didn't. She is a member of the Croatian Society of Writers and the European poetry platform Versopolis.