Koutnice – Šustková Tereza (2024)

I am trying to walk a delicate line between openness and concealment," Tereza Šustková (born 1991) characterized her poetry in a recent interview. And this sentence fits well with the poetess's third collection, which sensitively and uniquely develops the rich tradition of our spiritual lyricism. The heraldic motif that gave its name to one of the sections and the entire book is the corner curtain, a corner cloth that once separated new mothers from the outside world. The new poems thus naturally touch upon (not only) female existence, yet they are not explicitly emphasized in an engaged manner. The perspective is universal; this is how we enter the world, this is our fate and our essence, and nothing will change that, whether through repression or, on the contrary, banalization. The fragile motif of concealment and separation permeates her entire work. What is buried "behind" or "under" the imaginary cloth? Can an anchor be found through heaviness? Even all that is rejected, humiliated, unattractive, small, twisted, tucked away in a corner can be summed up and celebrated in the poetry of silence and modesty. In the poetry of hope and pure experience.