Launch of a new poetry collection by the acclaimed author and performer Jana Orlová.

The poetry collection Forewomen navigates the boundaries between the body and memory, desire and fear, intimacy and violence. The voice that runs through it returns to the past, yet at the same time resists it—to the legacy of women whose experiences, wounds, and silences can be passed down from generation to generation like a stigma.

Past traumas, reappearing again and again in the flow of time, are one layer of this poetry, though not its sole key. Death, sexuality, power, guilt, the transformation of identity, and the constant struggle to name one’s own experience also emerge within it. The poems disintegrate and reassemble like a memory, a dream, or a body in images that are at once dark and grotesque, delicate and intensely sensual. Language here is not a safe place—it is rather a gateway that must be passed through.