Small Undetectable Thefts - by Yanita Georgieva (Paperback)

About the Book

Small Undetectable Thefts is an exploration of the ways in which our lives are marked by 'in-betweenness', loss and displacement, and what is gained as a result. A masterclass in the craft of the line, this is a pamphlet to savor.

Book Synopsis

In these astounding poems, Yanita Georgieva explores the different thefts and losses that accompany the human condition - from the theft of freedom and origin to that of loved ones and bodily autonomy. What happens after the theft? Can there be joy in it? At the heart of the pamphlet is an interrogation of grief, sexuality, and memory through the prism of the immigrant experience. Small Undetectable Thefts is an exploration of the ways in which our lives are marked by 'in-betweenness', loss and displacement, and what is gained as a result. A masterclass in the craft of the line, this is a pamphlet to savor and return to again and again.

Review Quotes

What a sneakily brilliant thing! In Small Undetectable Thefts, the quotidian rhythms of life unravel, the threat and thrill of the mundane tipping into the absurd and transcendent. The images are crisp, unfussy and often startling. The speaker addresses us like a favoured co-conspirator, inviting and endlessly inquisitive. Georgieva diagnoses the human condition as 'incurable' but fleetingly redeeming, excavating fragile moments of beauty with a light touch and mordant wit.

- Vanessa Kisuule

In these brilliantly sly poems of displacement and theft, language circulates in surreptitious and uncanny ways. Georgieva renders the riches of experience with unsparing clarity, but the particles and objects of these poems somehow slip, as in dreams, out of the reader's grasp. Things that should be most securely personal - hands, hairs, memories, a familiar song - are lost or stolen away. "Quickly we learn / of impermanence", the way the world changes even as the body is caught in moments of stasis. These poems give us the world on a knife-edge, waiting "for what the mind will do next" - a place of discomfort articulated in all its strangeness, with mordant and rueful humour.

- James Wilkes

'The Details Here Are Not Important' is the title of one of the opening poems of Yanita Georgieva's electric and witty debut pamphlet Small Undetectable Thefts goes and yet they really are. Her expertly curated images -- a cracked pot / of blue jasmine, the wilt / of an abandoned / tulip, the neighbours / rooting for us in their nightgowns, a gambler's / insatiable tongue -- are the existential signposts in this sweeping, film-noirish narrative which reads in places like a feverous hybrid of Matthew Sweeney's alternative realism and the sweet, off-kilter ingenuity of Selima Hill.

Georgieva lures us into this world and leads us in a search for answers with the assistance of narrators who carry the weight of cities on their shoulders, narrowly avoiding disaster, gripping onto the wheels of wayward cars in a perpetual game of hide and seek with all the beauty just out of reach, in the darkness of the margins. Her poetry feels like the sharp cusp of desire and the sensation of a new season in a strange country. Through this small, brave collection Georgieva communicates that there are some things too painful to admit or to face head on and offers us instead small flashes of light to illuminate the drab monotony of modern life.

Granting us the gift of the glimpse, Small Undetectable Thefts combines the dream-like with the banal and tutors us in the sparkling art of the mundane - through the washer, the spin cycle, or the ripe perfection of a lime cut into wedges she explores the parameters of intimacy and memory. Though as she writes in 'same old' that we're too precious with endings, by the close of this stellar pamphlet we feel schooled in the aesthetics of dread, the mysteries of faulty appliances, our stubborn, unknowable bodies, and the quiet devastating power of the unarticulated.

- Lucy Holme