Serbian writer Ana Stjelja has just published her new edition - the dystopian poem Sangria. This publication was published as a bilingual edition, in Serbian and English.
The dystopian poem explores themes of a bleak and oppressive future, often reflecting on social issues, control, and the consequences of unchecked power. It delves into the darker aspects of human existence in a distorted or nightmarish world.
This poetic work deals with a subject that every poet would wish to avoid, to perhaps never write. Its core is painful and full of bitterness, which is not easy to deal with, neither from the position of the writer, nor from the position of the reader.
About her motivation and inspiration to write a dystopian poem, the author said:
The poetic discourse within which my latest poem Sangria takes place, places the Man of today in front of a dark and gloomy mirror in which he can clearly (for the sake of absurdity) see everything that awaits him. Nothing good, noble and worth the joy of life. A future without a future. With this poem, I wanted to express my intimate feeling, but also my attitude towards the world we live in, as well as to point out what horrors await us in the future. This is my personal, inner and intuitive feeling. This poem is actually on the trail of my second collection of poetry, Atavi (2004), in which I quite intuitively wrote some, as it turned out over time, prophetic verses. The very title of the poem Sangria alludes to two opposites - pleasure and blood (sweetness through suffering), that is what is offered to us as humanity today. I think that the poetry of the future will be dystopian in every sense because we are walking towards our end, like a civilization that, perhaps unaware of it, experienced a spiritual collapse.
Poem Sangria is a joint electronic edition of the author and the Alia Mundi Association for the Promotion of Cultural Diversity.
The poem can be read at THIS link.