This poetry project explores the full spectrum of human vulnerability and strength, drawing inspiration from the intimate and often contradictory nature of everyday life. It attends to moments that are at once beautiful and sad, to emotions that appear small yet carry an undercurrent of danger or intensity. Through these seemingly ordinary experiences, the work reveals layers of emotional depth that are frequently overlooked.
At its core, the project invites the audience to acknowledge and remain with discomfort rather than seek to resolve it. It proposes a quiet but firm assertion: human worth is not rooted in perfection, but in the ability to feel, endure, and move through the complexity of lived experience. By articulating feelings that often remain unspoken, the poems create a space of recognition, encouraging listeners to find universality within their most private and isolated moments and to embrace the unfinished, fragile reality of being human.
The project is part of the subtheme Unruly Forms – Experiments in the Poetic Wild.
Author
Yanislava Shikova
Yanislava Shikova is a 16-year-old poet from Bulgaria. Her engagement with literature and the written word began early, and she wrote her first poem at the age of thirteen. Since then, poetry has become an essential part of her everyday life and a primary way of exploring herself and the world around her.
She writes across a wide emotional register, moving between what she describes as the beautiful, the sad, the dangerous, and the small. Rather than centering her work on a single theme, Yanislava is interested in the shifting textures of human experience and the quiet intensity of personal moments. This openness allows her writing to remain exploratory and intuitive, shaped by curiosity rather than fixed ideas.
