Hello and welcome!
époque press is an independent publisher based between Brighton and Dublin established to promote and represent the very best in new literary talent.
Through a combination of our main publishing imprint and our online ezine we aim to bring inspirational and thought provoking work to a wider audience.
Our main imprint is seeking out new voices, authors who are producing high-quality literary fiction and who are looking for a partner to help realise their ambitions. Our commitment is to fully consider all submissions on literary merit alone and to provide a personal response.
Our ezine will showcase a combination of the written word, visual and aural art forms, bringing together artists working in different mediums to encourage and inspire new perspectives on specific themes.
For details of how to submit your work to us for consideration please follow the submissions guidelines and for all other enquiries please email info@epoquepress.com
Hello and welcome!
époque press is an independent publisher based between Brighton and Dublin established to promote and represent the very best in new literary talent.
Through a combination of our main publishing imprint and our online ezine we aim to bring inspirational and thought provoking work to a wider audience.
Our main imprint is seeking out new voices, authors who are producing high-quality literary fiction and who are looking for a partner to help realise their ambitions. Our commitment is to fully consider all submissions on literary merit alone and to provide a personal response.
Our ezine will showcase a combination of the written word, visual and aural art forms, bringing together artists working in different mediums to encourage and inspire new perspectives on specific themes.
For details of how to submit your work to us for consideration please follow the submissions guidelines and for all other enquiries please email info@epoquepress.com
époque press
pronounced: /epƏk/
definition: /time/era/period
époque press
pronounced: /epƏk/
definition: /time/era/period
époque press ezine
Katarina Sarić
100 Years with Aleksandra Kollontai
But I only wanted to protect and defend you
to bury every memory of painful embryo and woe
of social wrong
trenches and weeded roofs
I wanted to prick off your eyes with a golden hook
so you see
to act as your speed bump
that whore at the corner of the street
an orphan a patient a widow
a saint a sinner a boxing bag a spittoon
so you feel better
to drop off to the size of a bean
grey afternoon with no whiff
to be the voice of the first bugle
and that grindstoned sabre
from the hook and the rake
to unbury from the cradle to the grave
each and every sore pestiferous
and to be the first to lie in it by choice
For you I wanted to clench my teeth
to stretch you in the body of a timid runt
and back to break so I can prove
how much I love you with deeds not platitudes
To break all of your windows and your bogus nails
displays and the windshields
to drag you by your locks onto the waves
of a new revolution
a new word to make up for it
and not be left high and dry
on a ripped off declaration
on consumer basket with flour and oil
on an action sale
on a doormat at the Delta exit
on a bag of soup a sack of grits
To be your Lupa
to mother for you Romulus and Remus
should we build on those forums our world new and brave
so that upstream rushes all that still can breathe
free and out of the groove and forever
against the disgrace of us all
From the handful of ash I would have risen for you
if you could only pardon my extended hand
The Third Tango
My daughter is playing on the square with the city band
a contraption
which stands for a classical piano
synthesizer it is called--
abusively says my dad
who is horribly unnerved by noise
synthesized time unites all the sound and sense
and I still somehow hope that it will unite all the old
Slavs
he kept beseeching god that she not be like me--a naked whim
not to stitch for score
She plays the waltz from the First Echelon
of a Soviet film I've never managed to see
but I do remember some of the remakes
local allusions
to the theme
Komsomolets on for the steppes of Qazaqstan
on to get rich overnight
I didn't have to see
well, haven't I seen the one
the Kopaonik excursion
the years in which rock'n'roll died
and there was no one to drive with me on the midnight train
when drunk I shed my hymen with the first machinist man
from the discotheque
in an unease less I'd be the only chaste
before the certificate of graduated maturity
and to be continued
some domesticated and already famed bone-breakers
-- who translate every imported idea unspeakably literally --
pulled the first guns against real bullets
of some
who had but billiard cues
there is again a fault in the brain
and the conk broke before it flowered
our shortened graduation excursion
through our shortened land
No one danced with me the graduation dance
for there were thirty two of us skirts at that language school
My daughter is playing the first tango from the Echelon
she really stamps on it with her left foot
yet still in the drained land
I am dancing to her earthquake
on my own path
and I know already
that it has never been for nothing
that not me is
she
that she will pay them my debt
I Need Air
When stretched under the bark
she
whose womb is torn up by her sons
and the fear has gone from
woman
mother
life
I will collect the hem of the pleated dress
and will sew in a new heart
to suit a solemn affair
as sewed on
this face and this picture
sick from anemia
- I need air
the cast of mining shaft
is recast in the last
cycle of alchemy
dried out tears from the cradle
When the sea spits out
the last bones of the domesticates fossils
I will be sitting on the beach
plucking stones from stones
positioned as the postcard girl
in that cliche
stuck
and unavoidably dreamy
in white
with that lovelock over the brow
smoothed down
I will pose in the glory of innocence
of the new birth
while, actually, I would want to scream
and destroy the frame
- I need air
under Heracles' stairways
the Greek tragedians who glorified patricide
rape of
mother
earth
woman
justified it as ignorance
dead is my shame
and no-one came
to its burrial
it went straight to spam
When she gets up and streches
dusty
raped
ragged
scratched
earth
mother
woman
in the last cry
of epic finale
who stays breathless
When father and brother and friend are gone
I will come back to that old place of ours
under the Iron bridge
I will cut out from cement the names long engraved
take them away
to Africa
I will become the ring of time
a verse
that closes the circle
away from the land of our ancestors
Katarina Sarić is a poet from Montenegro, whose work here is translated by Dr. Marija Krivokapić. Her work explores love and the disturbing relationships between man and woman in this new age of the internet.