Kindness Separates Night From Day
Translated from the Croatian by Vesna Marić
In Kindness Separates Night From Day, Marija Dejanović “looks at herself from a distance until she recognizes herself.” This collection is a marvel of refined verse that explores the concept of the eternal stranger: the self. As a deeply perceptive witness with a passion for reflection, Dejanović’s ideas unfold and bloom throughout as memory and history surface in the present, and recast it, to awaken readers from the slumber of self-evident happiness and make clear with crystalline imagery the beneficial truths of harsh realities.
Marija Dejanović was born in Prijedor, Bosnia and Herzegovina, in 1992. She grew up in Croatia, Sisak, and currently lives between Zagreb, Croatia, and Larissa, Greece. She studied Comparative literature and Pedagogy at the University of Zagreb. In 2018, Ethics of Bread and Horses (Etika kruha i konja) won the Goran award and the Kvirin award; in 2019, Heartwood (Središnji god) won the Zdravko Pucak. In 2021, her third book, Kindness Separates Night From Day (Dobrota razdvaja dan i noc) was shortlisted for Croatia’s biggest poetry award, Tin Ujevic, and the regional award Avdina Okarina.