Hleba i cigara!

A fierce critique of a world without love, in which the inner child cannot survive.

Some books appear quietly, take their place on a shelf and wait to be discovered. Others enter the literary space as a breakthrough, tearing down the doors of their own intimacy and of social conventions with such force that it is impossible to stay aside. „Hleba i cigara!” by Milica Stojanović belongs to that second, rarer kind.

This book before us is a pulsing organism, in which every verse is a nerve ending exposed to the world without a protective membrane. Milica does not write poetry to decorate it; she uses it to diagnose, dissect and, finally, to survive. The whole project of this book is a painstaking and uncompromising search for authentic speech in a time that deafens us with the noise of empty narratives. That search begins from the only possible place... From herself!

„Hleba i cigara!” is a collection that hurts, makes you laugh and makes you think. Milica Stojanović does not write to be liked, but to understand. And that is exactly why, after reading it, we feel that we too, together with her, have come to understand ourselves and the world around us a little better. This is not just a book of poems; it is a document of the struggle for meaning, waged in the only place where that struggle is possible at all – in language.

– Vladimir Tomić, writer and philosopher