Luljeta Lleshanaku
The writer, critic and editor Peter Constantine, in his introduction to Fresco, sums up her style in this way: Luljeta Lleshanaku is a pioneer of Albanian poetry.Her poetry's remarkable variety of themes, which avoids [sic] simplistic reactions to a terrible past and an unstable present and future, is perhaps one of the elements that makes her poems contemporary classics of world literature.She speaks individually to her readers, the mark of a true poet able to transcend time and culture.In his afterword to Fresco, translator Henry Israeli added: She is quiet but tough, and her raw brand of honesty and biting humor can offend as quickly as her innocence and sincerity can draw one back in.She can be as direct, critical, and perversely funny as she is in her poems, where, for instance, she states that "our breath disappearing in my lungs / is like lilies dropped into a cesspool."They are, for the most part, short, contained studies, still lifes [sic] rendered abstractly, yet they soar within the boundless imagination of a speaker who delights in the sensual, the tactile, who "light as an Indian feather ... can easily reach the moon" and witnesses "asteroids dying like drones / in ecstasy for their love, their queen."