The Condemned Apple: Selected Poetry (Green Integer)

In this bilingual edition, Green Integer presents, for the first time in English, the poetry of the greatest living Albanian poet. As Janice Mathie-Heck makes clear in her introduction, Visar Zhiti lived a life of great privation: locked away in dictator Enver Hoxha’s prisons, Zhiti was not allowed pencil or paper. He wrote his poems in his mind, and he and other prisoners committed them to memory, in part to keep their sanity and to enliven the terrible lives they were forced to bear. Only when Hoxha fell from power and the political prisoners were freed was Zhiti’s poetry brought to print.

Now English-speaking readers can share in the remarkably gentle and imagistically rich poems produced out of Zhiti’s years of suffering.