Dorota Suránová’s Odlety (meaning "departures" or "flight aways") is a poetic exploration of deracination and the identity crisis experienced by those who leave their homeland. Slovakia, a country with one of the highest brain drain rates in the EU, sees its youth departing in search of opportunities elsewhere—an almost universal experience. Through Odlety, Suránová captures the emotional and psychological landscape of this phenomenon, weaving themes of displacement, memory, and transformation.
The poem gemeran evokes the quiet unraveling of home and identity—threads pulling loose, landscapes shifting, and the familiar dissolving into distance. With stark imagery and restrained intensity, it is a meditation on belonging in a world where home feels both within reach and impossibly far away.
gemeran
slowly
a web unspools
woven from a simpler place
like thread unraveling
from a foreign sweater
when plaster cracks
rubber splits
a ball bursts mid spin
a wheel ignites
like a grinding tooth
no shore only wires
electric rivers flood the air
exhaling concrete
shutting the world inside
everything folds
into a child’s carriage
windows just out of reach
The project is part of the subthemes Re-imagining identity through poetry, Cultural Resilience - Literature as a force for social justice.
Author
Dorota Suránová
Dorota Suránová is a Slovak poet and currently a student of cultural anthropology in Vienna. Within her texts, she usually positions herself as an observer, sensitively depicting details, which for others might seem insignificant. She won multiple literary competitions and had her texts published in magazines such as Romboid and Vertigo. She presented her work at art festivals in Italy and Slovakia.
