Chez Robert Giron

Vladimir Levchev's most recent book of poetry titled The Refugee has been released by Gival Press.


This collection of poetry is translated from the Bulgarian into English by the poet with the assistance from Henry Taylor and Alicia Ostriker.


Advance Praise:
“Vladimir Levchev’s work has been for several decades an important poetic bridge between Bulgaria and the US. This book will surely strengthen that reach.”
—Elizabeth Kostova

“These spare, beautiful poems—so imaginatively rich and expertly distilled—vibrate with a restless brilliance, reminding us, as Levchev writes in The Refugee, that ‘every minute/ has its secret corridors/ leading to dark rooms.’ Reading them, I felt as if I could hear the silences from which they are made now begin to gather themselves into these true and necessary words.”
—Richard McCann, author of Mother of Sorrows


“Vladimir Levchev’s poetry: An original voice, wise beyond its years. A dark vision, but beautiful all the same.”
—The late William Meredith

“His poetry is a place you’ll never want to leave. We are in the presence of a large spirit who writes in the greatest tradition of European masters. The world of literature is lucky to have him.”
—Grace Cavalieri, Prooducer/Host “The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress”


Biography:


Vladimir Levchev is a Bulgarian poet and writer whose parents are a poet and an artist. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Sofia, in 1982, and from the MFA program in Creative Writing at American University in Washington, DC, in 1996. Levchev’s magazine Glas (“Voice” or “Vote”), was the first independent periodical in Communist Bulgaria, and it was banned by the authorities before the downfall of the regime on November 10, 1989. It featured some of the best known Bulgarian and Eastern European dissidents. Levchev received a Fulbright scholarship in 1994. He resided and worked as a language instructor and a professor of literature in the United States for 13 years. Since 2007, he has been teaching literature and writing at the American University in Sofia, Bulgaria.


He has 15 books of poetry, two books of essays, and two novels published in Bulgaria. He has had three books of poetry, Leaves from the Dry Tree, Black Book of the Endangered Species, and The Rainbow Mason, published in the United States. His poetry has appeared in many anthologies and literary magazines, including Poetry, Chicago, Child of Europe: Anthology of New East European Poetry (Penguin, 1990), The Anthology of Magazine Verse & Yearbook of American Poetry (1997), Clay and Star: Contemporary Bulgarian Poets (Milkweed Press, 1992), etc. His poems have been translated for literary magazines in Russian, German, French, Greek, Turkish, Polish, Hungarian, Punjabi, and Hebrew.

Levchev is the translator of Allen Ginsberg, Stanley Kunitz, and other American poets in Bulgarian.



To order a copy at Amazon.com, click on the link below:


The Refugee