SLAYING THE MOSQUITO
By Xhevdet Bajraj
A man under the spell of madness . . . the wrath of the righteous against the wily . . . the actor thrills to the roots of the hair . . .
— Eliona Lata, Gazeta Shekulli, Kosovo
A man exiled by the war, who in exile is missing a part of himself. . . He feels soulless, far from a home he dreams of, but can no longer reach.
— Anna Di Lellio, from the introduction to One Flew over the Kosovo Theater, An Anthology of Contemporary Plays from Kosovo
Political poetry in the broadest sense . . . observed from various angles, but always with a lucid bite. Very. — Héctor Carreto, Periódio de Poesía, Mexico City
Satire of the highest degree, wrought of metaphor, and made for a century like this: alarmed to an unthinkable extreme.
— Rybak Dabaj, Pashtriku, Kosovo
Through the course of a night, and across illimitable space, a man from Kosovo is plagued by a mosquito.
A discourse that stretches from the lyrical to the language of advertising and pop culture . . . A stream of consciousness as conceived by that Irish Catholic who redirected the return of Ulysses to his own house in Ireland. ~Héctor Carreto, Periódio de Poesía, Mexico City.
ABOUT XHEVDET BAJRAJ
Drawing by Florent Pista
His poetry expresses a melancholy that covers his whole being, inside and out. — Albulena Zylbeari, Pan Albanica
Already the greatest Albanian poet of the twenty-first- century. — Rybak Dabaj, Pashtriku, Kosovo
Xhevdet Bajraj is a professor of creative writing and literature at the Autonomous University of Mexico City. Working in both Albanian and Spanish, he has published more than twenty award-winning books of verse, which have been translated into many languages. He has also appeared as a co-star of Aro Tolbukhin, In the Mind of the Killer, Mexico’s submission to the 2003 Oscars.
