Paper Shoes Carnegie Mellon Poetry in Translation

"Pavel Šrut's fractured lyrics are often themselves fractured parables about the individual's relation to authority, whether that authority be the state, a colonizing power, the court of public opinion, a dubious beloved, or history itself. In some of his poems, the wives of Great Men have the last, often hilarious, word on their husbands' accomplishments, and in others a poor Everyman schmuck Novak-- the Czech equivalent of Smith, though even more suggestive of ordinariness-- bumps his head, again and again, on the iron question mark at the heart of existence."--Amazon.com.