The Moon is a Pill

Aušra Kaziliunaite’s poetry has been described as ‘post-avant-garde’; she is unafraid to shock readers with her surreal, ugly-beautiful imagery, alternative form, and regular resistance to the rigidity of social norms. In The Moon is a Pill, a collection of the best of Aušra’s poetry, translated by Rimas Uzgiris, the reader discovers the extent of the poet’s social engagement, mixed with a swirl of psychedelia through an existential lens. As she walks around her city, questioning God, stalked by an abandoned stuffed bird, finding a grubby child in an egg, searching for answers in bus stops and windows, her writing is intimate and personal, yet never reassuring, never fluffy, and often with a quiet nod to the complex political past of her country: who can stop you from writing what you want?/ we must understand that his times were those of censorship/ we now live in a greenhouse like some kind of tomato… from ‘Freedom’..