Description

In the shadowed corners of the heart, where love, loss, and longing dissolve into one another, Serbian poet Violeta Milovanovic unfolds her haunting second collection — forty-two poems written between 2012 and 2013, saturated with moonlight, silver blades, dark brides, werewolves, tulips on graveyards, and lovers who arrive only to vanish.

*A Dark Crystal Queen* is a slim, intense volume for readers who read poetry the way they read prayer — slowly, alone, in the small hours. In its pages, a dark bride weeps at the summit of eternity. A queen roams the earth searching for a heart delivered by a knight who is already dead. A soul in a cage sings undead songs. Battered dreams sleep at the bottom of a sea in a sealed jar, waiting for the perfect tide. An electric guitar strokes an aphonic heart. And through it all, a poet writes and writes and refuses to stop — *power to the pen!* — even when the words are called worthless and the star on the horizon tells her to give up.

Milovanovic writes in the gothic-romantic tradition — think Poe by way of the eastern European night, moonlit corridors filled with silence, sorrow, and stubborn defiance. Her verses are brief, imagistic, unafraid of melodrama, and threaded through with a strange, quiet triumph: *still, I rise. They crush me, they break me — still, I don’t bow down.*

For readers of Sylvia Plath, Christina Rossetti, and Anne Sexton. For anyone who has ever loved someone who did not come back. For anyone who reads poetry to find, in someone else’s careful sentences, the exact shape of their own dark hour.

Beautiful. Bruised. Unforgettable.