"This volume is gracefully unified by its commitment to enjambment as a way of rendering familiar narratives suddenly and wonderfully strange. As the book unfolds, the work is increasingly inhabited by silence, which amplifies the surreal and often disconcerting moments in each intricately imagined dreamscape. Šalamun provocatively places the line in tension with the sentence, allowing suspense to accumulate and undermining expectations of narrative resolution. Šalamun’s poems are as subversive in their craft as they are in their thinking, and this translation preserves that originality of thought and expression."
— Publishers Weekly, starred review, on Druids by Tomaž Šalamun

“Opera Buffa stuns the reader with its imaginative flair, energetic wit, and existential reach. The poems’ couplets employ a staccato rhythm that creates a sense of the inexorable march toward both endings and beginnings. That people and things exist(ed), that injustice shapes lives and countries, that joy arises unbidden—these preoccupy Šalamun as he, metaphorically speaking, engages with Wittgenstein’s ‘Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.’ In Matthew Moore’s crackling translation, Šalamun marries the comical and the serious as he addresses the factness of the world in his inimitable way. ”
— Alen Hamza, author of Twice There Was A Country