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About the Book

Ani Gjika was born in Albania and came of age just after the fall of Communism, a time when everyone had a secret to keep and young women were afraid to walk down the street alone. When her family immigrates to America, Gjika finds herself far from the grandmother who helped raise her, grappling with a new language, and isolated from aging parents who are trying in their own ways to survive. When she meets a young man whose mind leans toward writing, as hers does, Ani falls in love—at least, she thinks it’s love.

Set across Albania, Thailand, India, and the U.S., An Unruled Body is a young woman’s journey to selfhood through the lenses of language, sexuality, and identity, and how she learns to find freedom of expression on her own terms. 

Praise for An Unruled Body: 

"Readers will be impressed by the author’s bold willingness to face the horrors of her childhood as she artfully blends an insightful look at her native country’s societal issues with her own family’s immigration story and her ongoing journey to sexual health. A poignant literary and personal achievement."

— Booklist starred review

“The author’s poetic prowess is clearly reflected in this text’s lyrical, clean lines, as well as in her compassionate but critical analysis of every character of the story, including herself . . . this is a gorgeously written look at a difficult topic.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“Throughout An Unruled Body, language serves as rich soil from which to grow. It is, in part, a story of sexual awakening: Gjika narrates her marriage, her fears, her experience with a sex counselor, and her own experiments and explorations with her body. And more, it's about what it is to say instead of not, to put to words what is most difficult to express. ‘How do I construct a story out of silence?’ she asks. The book is an answer, and one that reminds us that vulnerability is one of the highest forms of strength. Gjika, with warmth, candor, poetry, passion, and poise, shows her growing fluency with the language the body speaks, and how to listen to what it says.”

— Nina MacLaughlin, Boston Globe

“An Unruled Body paints a new portal of entry into the nation’s role in the multiple layers of our experiences with consent and sensuality. Ani Gjika makes us remember that these pages, and this memoir, are made for feeling our way through the chaos while making memories of pleasure and resistance.”

—Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: An American Memoir

“An Unruled Body, a poet's memoir, takes us travelling between Albania before and after the fall of communism, through languages, loves, betrayals and transgressions to Thailand, India, the U.S., and a new consciousness of the body’s deep wisdom.”

—Jessica Moore, author of The Whole Singing Ocean

“An Unruled Body compellingly draws readers along Gjika’s journey toward sexual freedom, and the experience is breathtaking. At times meditative, and at times cinematic, Gjika writes about the intricacies of patriarchy, trauma, and sex with unflinching clarity and nuance, and an embodied sense of suspense that will keep your heart pounding.”

—Jonathan Escoffery, author of If I Survive You

“Ani Gjika has written a searing reminder that history lives in the body and a love letter to the power of language to restore us to ourselves. Beautiful, impactful, and deeply moving, An Unruled Body resonates far beyond its pages.”

—Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, author of The Fact of a Body

“This lush, gorgeous, and sexy memoir is about desire hidden and finally claimed. As this brave, astonishingly talented writer and award-winning translator moves across far-flung countries and cultures, she also listens to the language of the entire world, making a home on the page—where she translates herself.”

—Aviya Kushner, author of The Grammar of God

“An Albanian-born poet and translator, Ani Gjika has a voice that is precise, surprising, and wholly her own. Her writing made me think more deeply about how to live in the world and how to be more awake to sensations from without and from within. This book is a gift and a delight.”

—Alysia Abbott, author of Fairyland

“In this lyrical and intimate memoir, Ani Gjika reflects on her Albanian upbringing, her family’s immigration to the U.S. and her exploration of autonomy, identity, sexuality and selfhood. Bridging taboo and truth, patriarchy and power, this is a singular and powerful journey."

— Karla J. Strand, Ms. Magazine

“Gjika’s memoir is a reminder that translation—of trauma, the body, sex, and grief—is not always easy but vital.”

— Kathryn Savage, World Literature Today

“A testament to the power of writing to cope with trauma and pain.”

— Eric Liebetrau, “5 Big Nonfiction Books From Small Presses,” Kirkus Reviews 

“Although this is a memoir, An Unruled Body almost reads like it's a part Proust novel, part Szymborska / Lleshanaku / Lorca poetry collection. Immersive, imagistic, and attentive to the lived life in and out of the body. Gjika investigates what can and can't be contained (in the girl, in the woman, in memory, in language, in love, sex, and heartbreak). In an inspired move, Gjika creates forms and sentences that are ambitious and complex, written in the poet's clean and intentionally understated prose. Ani Gjika proves that she is more than a translator and a poet, but a survivor, a listener, an emotional historian that is daring to live with her own history as fully as she can fathom.”

—Raymond Antrobus, author of The Perseverance

“With a poet’s eye for detail, Ani Gjika invites her readers into the intricacies of a life, making us feel as if we are experiencing the story in real-time alongside her. The voice in An Unruled Body is brave, raw, and immediate. If prose is the vehicle that carries the narrative, poetry is the heart and soul that feeds the imagination in this memoir. From a writer who learned English by memorizing Emily Dickinson’s opening lines, comes a book that we will want to commit to memory and return to many times over.”

—Eve Joseph, author of In the Slender Margin

“With tiny verses of poetry springing into the story like budding bouquets, An Unruled Body is a memoir about language, love, and the echo of generations that’s both uncommonly intimate and boldly kaleidoscopic. Gjika unpacks the thorny riddle of living in a body with such care and precision, yet still shows her reader a vast, teeming, and achingly beautiful world. What a thrill to read.”

—Mike Scalise, author of The Brand New Catastrophe

“With a poet’s ear for sound and magic and rhythm, and a page-turning storytellers’ sense of narrative, Ani Gjika’s An Unruled Body is a hypnotic and ruthlessly honest account of navigating the enduring complexities of sexuality, gender, religion, and identity. This is a book the entire human race should read.”

—Matthew Vollmer, author of All of Us Together in the End

“Sprinkled with poetry throughout, [Gjika's] prose is gripping, her voice is alive, fully hers and no other’s (although she officially thanks her literary heroes for having shown her the way). She cums and cries and angers and hurts and overcomes and embraces and lets go on the page for no one else’s sake but her own and this is the super-power of this memoir. It doesn’t ask for the reader’s love or understanding or appreciation. It’s a love letter to the/her self.”

—Odeta Xheka

“In her courageous and profoundly moving memoir, Albanian-born poet and translator Ani Gjika reconstructs her personal history in Albania, America, and beyond, naming traumas that often remain unspoken. Gjika is unafraid to delve into the most taboo topic for a woman raised in a religious family within a patriarchal society: sex. The book that emerges is memorable, rich, and daring, simultaneously a portrait of Albania during the fall of communism; an exploration of language, desire, and power; and a bracingly honest sexual coming of age that unfolds across continents. . . . An Unruled Body is a different kind of immigrant story, one that demands that we consider the specific, insidious ways that patriarchy controls a woman’s relationship to her body, mind, and expression. With a poet’s ear, Gjika finds language for confronting misogyny and the male gaze on the most intimate terms, ultimately revealing the transformational power of self-discovery through the written word.”

—Prize Judges Francisco Cantú, Shuchi Saraswat, and Ilan Stavans

Praise for ANI GJIKA: 

“Albania. India. Massachusetts. The mass culture posters of an American adolescent and the mass uniformity of a police state. Snow and bread. Ani Gjika has created penetrating, alert and elegant poems that successfully bring her unique voice to English—a language of mixed, tangled roots, perennially renewed by spirits like hers. Her poems suggest new realities and new imaginings that defy familiar notions about our old, central story of immigration to the United States.”

—Robert Pinsky

“Language that’s at once immediate and new: a black and white floor is ‘like a mouth of broken teeth, a baleen of darkness / sieving out new human destinies.’ Urgent and original.”

—The Boston Globe

“Ani Gjika . . . is ideally placed to traffic been the land of her birth and her adopted homeland, the way Charles Simic has done since the 1960s with Serbia . . . I wish her patience, talented originals, and many decades.”

—Michael Hoffman, London Review of Books

“Ani Gjika comes across as a real poet. Her metaphors are sometimes elusive, but they seem to come from a real place.”

—Mark Halliday

“Ani Gjika’s book follows a gentle narrative arc from her Albanian childhood, her life in India and Thailand, to accommodation to life with all its immigrant difficulties in New England. It is also a life in her adopted poetic language, in which the sound of a commuter train becomes a promise of composition and integration: ‘Whistles weeeeeave weave weeeeave...’ (‘Location’). She has made this language her own in poems beautifully woven in a design of great depth of feeling and intelligence.”

—Rosanna Warren

“How does a stranger through language reach inside your chest to crush or cradle your heart? And with such few material as a few words? What other art form is so powerful? Ani Gjika is a crucial and original voice and translator across two languages.”

—Sean Thomas Dougherty

“Contrary to traditional Albanian poetry, Ani Gjika's poetry is rich in narrative style and an attention to detail which makes reading her work a rewarding and intimate act. In Gjika's work we find a softened version of irony, or lack of a purposely critical tone, which distinguishes her style from that of many American poets. The element that unifies her work is precisely the tenderness with which she approaches reality, but a tenderness without sentimentality."

—Luljeta Lleshanaku

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Albanian-born writer Ani Gjika is the author and literary translator of eight books and chapbooks of poetry, among them Bread on Running Waters (Fenway Press, 2013), a finalist for the 2011 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. Her translation from the Albanian of Luljeta Lleshanaku’s Negative Space (New Directions and Bloodaxe Books, 2018) won an English PEN Award and was shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize, PEN America Award, and Best Translated Book Award. She is a graduate of Boston University’s MFA program where she was a 2011 Robert Pinsky Global fellow, and GrubStreet’s Memoir Incubator program, where she was a 2019 Pauline Scheer Fellow. Having taught creative writing at various universities in the U.S. and Thailand, Gjika currently teaches English as a Second Language at Framingham High School in Massachusetts.

Read Ani Gjika’s interview with The Creative Independent here!

BOOK DETAILS

Hardcover ISBN: 9781632063403 • $26
Publication date: Nov 14, 2023
5.5" x 8.25" • 250 pages
Adult Trade / Nonfiction: Memoir / Sex & Gender / Literary / Travel
Rights: World