The poems in Smugglers move through rapid historical shifts and meditations on personal experience, exploring the depths and limits of comprehension through the people and geography of the Balkans. Ultimately, Ales Debeljak's urban imagination creates a mosaic--intimate and historical--of a vanished people and their country. Every poem in Smugglers is sixteen lines long--four quatrains, a common form for Debeljak. This structural regularity is reinforced by a commitment to visual balance, with each poem working as a kind of grid into which the poet pours memories and...