AN UNRULED BODY

An Albanian American poet retraces the complex path to her sexual awakening.

When she was 12, writes Gjika, she was raped on her way to school in Albania, where she grew up. As she recounts, it took two decades to talk to anyone about the trauma, during which time she married an Indian man named Ishan, who she met in an online poetry class. During their six-year marriage, the two never had sex, mostly because each time they tried, Gjika’s body shut down with fear and pain. The author began to see a sex counselor named Jean, who, the author writes, “will become someone who teaches me to listen to language. I see her as a translator, a fellow linguistic traveler. She engages in deep listening the way I do when I translate poetry.” The language Gjika hoped to learn was that of her own body. Under Jean’s guidance, the author was able to face the toxic elements of her marriage that, she realized, stymied her attempts at intense physical intimacy. In the process of healing, she had a romantic flirtation with a high school crush and a more serious relationship with a man who had two grown children. Each experience led Gjika closer and closer to facing her trauma—and to her ultimate, triumphant decision to remain a single, fulfilled woman. The author’s poetic prowess is clearly reflected in this text’s lyrical, clean lines, as well as in her compassionate but critical analysis of every character of the story, including herself. Toward the end, the text meanders, lacking the tightly edited, perfect pacing of the first two-thirds. Overall, though, this is a gorgeously written look at a difficult topic. The book won the 2021 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing.

A soulful, insightful memoir about an Albanian immigrant’s quest to learn her body’s language.