Aušra Kaziliūnaitė’s poetry has been described as ‘post-avant-garde’; she is unafraid to shock readers with her surreal, ugly-beautiful imagery, alternative form, and regular resistance to the rigidity of social norms. In The Moon is a Pill, a collection of the best of Aušra’s poetry, translated by Rimas Uzgiris, the reader discovers the extent of the poet’s social engagement, mixed with a swirl of psychedelia through an existential lens. As she walks around her city, questioning God, stalked by an abandoned stuffed bird, finding a grubby child in an egg, searching for answers in bus stops and windows, her writing is intimate and personal, yet never reassuring, never fluffy, and often with a quiet nod to the complex political past of her country: who can stop you from writing what you want?/ we must understand that his times were those of censorship/ we now live in a greenhouse like some kind of tomato… from ‘Freedom’...
The Moon is a Pill is part of the Parthian Baltic project which was launched in time for the London Book Fair 2018. The poetry collections were launched at the Wheatsheaf Parthian Poetry Festival in April 2018.
Aušra Kaziliūnaitė is one of Lithuania’s most exciting young writers. Poet, prose writer and philosopher, she shares her time between Vilnius and Amsterdam and takes advantage of her fresh and colourful social media presence to promote human rights, especially feminist issues and those of the LGBT community. Aušra has so far published four books of poetry and received numerous national awards, including the Jurga Ivanauskaite Prize and the Young Artist Prize of the Ministry of Culture.