The Unexpected Answer by Silvia Choleva

The subtle desperation of Choleva's high modernism, the elegant freedom of her work, her uncompromising self-analysis and exacting reverence for language... This is the honesty of a master. The love.
- Marin Bodakov

Poetry that does not speak in rallying cries, song or prophesy, but quietly converses about what is always there: beauty, love, friendship - and also loss, pain, death. It does not try to divulge the meaning of things, but offers them a moment's warmth in the hands of another person.
- Kiril Vassilev

Choleva's poetry is an intimate survey of seemingly unchanging landscapes. Each morning calls for a careful redrawing of the contours of the world and of the self. The narrow planks of language serve as scaffolding; tragedy and contentment tread lightly on its walkways.
- Maria P. Vassileva

Silvia Choleva is a marvelous writer, and reading her work always brings me indescribable joy. Her poems are sharply observed and categorical, as if their author remembered every single detail of the world in the cells of her own body. Words well up with an irrefutable artlessness and rearrange the elements of reality, reinventing it, countering every conventional perspective or expectation.
- Gheorghi Arnaoudov

Silvia Choleva's poems begin suddenly, with the eye alighting upon a familiar object, or from the starting point of a memory, then gather speed in the associative flux of events, images and sensations, until, without fail, an almost magical shift occurs just before the end, a barely perceptible change, a turn in the essence of the poem, which is now leading you where you least expected, toward the wonder of discovery. This is a poetry of process, movement is its method, and real objects and phenomena are the basic elements of this poetic language, which never stops investigating and demands the world become its truth.
- Iana Boukova

Translated from Bulgarian by Elena Alexieva, Jonathan Dunne, Kaloyan Ignatovski, Marina Stefanova, Maria P. Vassileva.