Zaza Koshkadze’s A Midnight Dance for Cancer is his first and, so far, only collection: it gathers together poems which tell us, with the vocabulary and nihilism that is characteristic of them, about the everyday life of people who are in the lower depths, mentally and socially. The most prominent refrains in this book are sex and violence, which makes the book rather shocking. This is an aggressive critique of today’s cultural context. Unlike conventional, mainstream poetry, these are poems and about over-weight, dirty and crippled sex workers and about the people who love them and also about those who hate them. These are poems about socially unprotected sisters who are earning money to buy medicine for their mothers’ cancer treatment.

‘Although I write as someone with little or no knowledge of Georgian literature, it is impossible to keep a good poet down, and Zaza Koshkadze’s verse leaps off the page as coming from a place where night creatures stalk the ill-lit streets, where bodies shiver ecstatic between dirty sheets, where the winners are dissatisfied and sweating and the losers are dead, where urban dreams shrivel at the faintest hint of daylight, and deliverance trades a hard bargain with despair. Zaza is a writer to watch, and his poems celebrate life and berate it, the ghosts of Kerouac and Bukowski breathing down his neck, a brave new world to conquer.’   

Richard Gwyn, critic

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