This Is Not Why You Call Your Friends in the Middle of the Night by Evgeniya Dineva

“Without doubt one of the most distinguishable poetic voices in contemporary Bulgarian literature! Evgeniya Dineva’s poems are like a long postponed coming home—emotionally saturated and intimate. The absorbing sense of solitude in them creates a safe home for all of us, who often feel lost and turn confusion in life ‘into a ritual,’ while her beautiful, bright-colored metaphors, like ‘shiny sharp objects,’ surgically cut the imagination in order to stitch the mind and heal the soul.”

— Danila Raicheva, Author of One and the Same Woman

“In this chapbook, Evgeniya Dineva explores perennial poetic themes with an adept hand. At the center of these poems is a yearning to revisit, to reinhabit, to relive moments of failed intimacy with family, with lovers, with society, with nature. Dineva’s speakers remind us always that a lack of intimacy is a certain flavor of pain, but that intimacy rebuffed or misdirected is a distinct and equal trauma. The poet requires that we question why our successful intimacies fade into memory and become nostalgia, but our failed attempts haunt and become, in so many ways, our most treasured and cloistered obsessions.”

— Charles Fleming, AEIC of Passengers Journal



About the Author:

Evgeniya Dineva is a poet from Bulgaria. Her work appears in/are forthcoming in Asian Cha, Ethel, Oxford Poetry Library, The Hong Kong Review, and others. Her debut poetry collection Animals Have No Fathers, in Bulgarian, came out in November 2023. Her second poetry collection, Winter Ribs, is forthcoming in Spanish and Bulgarian by La Tortuga Press, 2025. The manuscript was one of the winners of the yearly contest of La Tortuga. She is also a scholarship fellow of the Elizabeth Kostova’s Foundation (Bulgaria) for their Sozopol Fiction Seminars 2023 edition, and a fellow of Passengers Journal’s 101 Writing workshop.