The poetry collection “Confessions are Worse Than Swear Words” by author Sofija Drakulović will be presented as part of the regular program of KIC “Budo Tomović” on Thursday, September 10, at the American Corner, starting at 20:00h. The writer Barbara Delać will speak about the book with the author.

The first book by the young Montenegrin poet Sofija Drakulović brings an authentic and recognizable poetic voice that takes shape on the borderline between everyday experience and its linguistic articulation. Starting from fragments of urban reality, intimate confessions, bodily sensations, and fleeting scenes, the author builds poetry that explores the instability of identity, the loneliness of modern man, and the boundaries of language in an attempt to express what remains elusive. “This poetry offers neither solutions nor comfort, but insists on the act of speech, even when it is falling apart. In this persistent attempt to articulate the elusive, between the image that tries to retain reality and the language that fails to encompass it, its deepest meaning is shaped,” the book’s editor, Valentina Knežević, pointed out in the preface.

Regarding the collection, the writer Tanja Stupar Trifunović noted that it contains “freshness, a passion for words and their possibilities,” emphasizing that these poems are “small hymns of tiny everyday victories and defeats, of the courage to be honest and vulnerable toward a world that chronically lacks these qualities.”

Sofija Drakulović (2002, Podgorica) is a master’s student at the Faculty of Philology in Nikšić, within the Study Program for Serbian Language and South Slavic Literatures. She has been a member of the KIC Young Writers Forum since 2022. She won second prize for the best poetry collection at the Slovo Gorčina festival in Stolac, and was also a finalist in the poetry competitions of the Slovo Gorčina festival and Ratković’s Poetry Evenings in 2024. Her poetry has been published in the magazines Strane, Čovjek, Bludni stih, Astronaut, and the Gazette of the “Radosav Ljumović” National Library.

The collection “Confessions are Worse Than Swear Words” represents a mature poetic debut by an author who, through an honest, witty, and at the same time restless gaze at reality, opens up space for new readings of contemporary Montenegrin poetry.

KIC “Budo Tomović”