Box - by Deres (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The Hungarian poet creates a vivid, unsettling poetic universe in which the body becomes a site of enclosure, trauma, memory, and performance.

Drawing on theatrical language, visual metaphor, and psychological interiority, the poems in BOX investigate how gender, vulnerability, spectacle, and private history shape one another. Through innovative structures and charged imagery, BOX stages both intimacy and estrangement. The collection's themes--embodiment, spectatorship, trauma, dream logic, and the instability of memory--align with current global conversations in feminist and experimental poetics. BOX offers a distinct Central and Eastern European perspective while contributing to broader literary discourses around the relationship between performance, gender, and the fragmented self.

About the Author

Kornélia Deres is a poet, writer, and associate professor at ELTE University in Budapest. Her debut collection, Szőrapa (Terrycloth Father), was awarded Best Debut Book Prize in 2011 and addresses the dynamics of a dark father figure. Her second, Bábhasadás (The Crack of the Puppet), appeared in 2017 and touches upon the interconnections of memory, dreams, cognition, and fiction. Her latest collection is BOX (2022), which presents a subversive universe through vivid imagery and dynamic language. She's a two-time Visegrad Literary Residency participant, a Móricz Zsigmond Literary Fellowship winner, and Térey János Literary Fellowship winner. In addition to her writing, she is engaged in experimental collaborative poetry performances. As a researcher, she investigates the interconnection of 19th-century scientific spectacles, wonder, and the circulation of knowledge.

Tímea Sipos is a Hungarian American writer, poet, and literary translator with an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and a certificate of translation from the Balassi Institute in Budapest. Her writing and her translations have appeared in numerous publications, including Prairie Schooner, Passages North, Juked, The Literary Review, The Florida Review Online, The Washington Square Review, Asymptote, Two Lines, The Offing, and Joyland, among others. A former Steinbeck Fellow and a Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival Fiction Prize Winner, she has published a chapbook of her own poetry. She has translated several collections of Hungarian poetry and received a 2026 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for her translation of Krisztián Marton's novel, Crybaby.

Trisztán Shkare is a Hungarian writer, literary translator, and visual artist who received his degree in BSc Psychology from University College London in 2025. During his time at UCL, he was an elected committee member of UCL Writers' Society, and served as chief editor of the society's magazine The Writers' Block. He is also a Commended Writer of the 2025 Adroit Prizes for Poetry and Prose, for his poetry. His academic work in cognitive neuroscience concerns the connection between interoception and mental disorders.