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Tzveta Sofronieva is the author of poems, stories, essays and lyric installations. She writes in German, Bulgarian and English. Her most recent books of poetry include Landscapes, Shore, Anthroposcene, Selected Affordable Studio Apartments, and her previous collection in English, A Hand Full of Water which was winner of the Cliff Becker Book Prize in Translation. Trained as a physicist and historian of science she brings these sensibilities and knowledge into her poetry.She was born in 1963 in Sofia, Bulgaria, and lives today, after stays in many countries, in Berlin, Germany.Jennifer Kwon Dobbs is an award-winning American poet and the author of two books of poetry and two chapbooks, most recently Interrogation Room, Currently an associate professor of creative writing and program director of Race and Ethnic Studies at St. Olaf College, she lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
Listen carefully, she has something to say -Joseph Brodsky The most compelling volume in German verse since the work of Ingeborg Bachmann and Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Sofronieva's memories go from Homer and Dostoevsky to Charlie Chaplin's dance steps. Each narration is a Cavafian voyage never completed in order to compel wonder. The lucent version by Chantel Wright capture the verve and florid images of Sofronieva's poetry. In the best sense her translation stands orders, as an original book of poetry. -Willis Barnstone For Tzveta Sofronieva, language is water that finds resistance across borders, her poetry flowing from her Balkan roots into her adopted German tongue, here iridescent in Chantel Wright's beautiful translation, 'seeking clues in the sand / that point to meanings.' From the Ionian Seam to the ancient city of Nosebag on the Black Sea, to the Baltic Coast. Her poetry merges the mythical landscape with personal memory in lines that take flight like Europa's wings. -Jeffrey Yang Tzveta Sofronieva's poetry is a stable force in a world shifting from expectations to disappointments to new expectations all over again. Reading her leads us across the old divisions that we were so long in the making and which fell so quickly. She reminds us that we are all on the same side. -David Chorlton The irrepressible bubbling energy that one senses in Tzveta Sofronieva's person as well as in her texts wells forth, like an artesian spring of poetry, in cascades of images. [...] Her references to antiquity are discreet and natural; they are productive appropriations rather than show. In part, they latch on to the legacy of Greek and Roman culture in the Balkans, and in part to a pan-European tradition with which the poet is more than familiar. Her references are often tongue-in-cheek, when, for example, she speaks of Odysseus and his crew , or when the captain of a vessel sailing through the Aegean Sea in summer sips on a beer called Mythos . - Michael Speier
