ABSTRACT
The Seventh Gesture consists of seventy-seven — the number is surely no coincidence — prose poems that are nearly all the same length: nine printed lines. The author mentions these arithmetic facts not because these subtle, gently thought-provoking texts written by the Bulgarian poet Tsvetanka Elenkova and smoothly translated by Jonathan Dunne are chilly, austere, or formally intimidating in any way, nor because they seem generated in accordance with some esoteric numerical scheme. On the contrary, the author of Amphipolis of the Nine Roads writes poetic prose that is full of human warmth and that addresses essential questions involving love, the family, death, and Christian Orthodox theology. Yet mathematics comes to mind because of the regularity of the page layout and also because her prose poems function like equations. Evocations of the body occur often in The Seventh Gesture and inevitably blossom into broader themes.
