Description of the Book:
This is a collection of more or less chronologically ordered poetry, that I have been lazily writing ever since I can remember. Today I am 24 years old, I am sitting on a balcony of a buddhist monastery in Kathmandu and my feet are going numb from the buddhist sitting position. In the past weeks, I haven't been doing much else than eating Dal bhat and saying Hellos and Goodbyes to other lovely fellow travellers. I came here to teach the little monks and girls, but in the midst of explaining the types of soil, English adverbs, basic algebra and nested for loops, I got an idea to finally put together some poems that have been collecting dust (or version updates) in my Notes app for ages.
It wasn't easy to select 21 poems that get to see the outside world, but I decided to choose the ones that loosely narrate my journey from leaving my home, through arriving in a foreign country, meeting some forget-not people, becoming an adult and leaving once more. I finished 20 of them already, and I left myself one more to write when I come home again.
With this collection, I only hope to help make poetry more reachable and exciting to anyone interested. But I do not consider myself a poet — not more than he who bought himself a ukulele to practice on weekends considers himself a guitarist. I find poetry an outlet to express myself freely, and me sharing this work is simply an attempt to relate and be relatable. If just one of these poems can touch just one of the readers, then I call it a success. And that’s it… I hope you like.
Disclaimer: All poems have been written explicitly without the use of any large language model and any similarity of characters to actual persons is not necessarily coincidental.
Walking the Shadow
Author's Name: Martin Karlík
About the Author: I was born and raised in a small town of Košeca in the northwest of Slovakia, and following my high school graduation I moved to Denmark. Since then, I have lived in the cities of Aalborg, Copenhagen and Mumbai. I’m just a regular everyday normal guy, who — other than leaving places — likes climbing rooftops, crossing countries, fixing bugs, my friends, soups and kiwis. Every now and then, I try to put together a few verses in usually a depressive, self-indulgent way, and this collection is the result… Or, if you will, my shadow. I hope you enjoy. Book ISBN: 9789360943110