Eternal Traffic

translated by James Sutherland-Smith

February 2020

70 pages

ISBN 978-1911469-61-2 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1911469-60-5 (paperback)

Mila Haugová has written a moving book about the farewell of loved ones and the slipping away of one's own life. The starting point is a double loss: her mother dies and her lover goes his own way. During her dead mother's childhood and distant past, the loved ones have faced a hoped-for future. Now only a reduced daily life remains, shot through with everpresent memories. Haugová overlays the departed, and now recalculated, images of childhood and days spent with her lover. Is it possible to find some memory of lost warmth in this cold world? Re-encounter and farewells are one in Haugová's poetry: there are intimate companions in the absence of loved ones, in the acceptance of their disappearance, which over time develop a cathartic force that makes possible new love.

Read an excerpt from Eternal Traffic

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