Bjuda is an account of woman,
or woman narrating her body, commencing with ‘the fine foetal skin’ on the day she was born, and ending with white(less)ness on her death bed, or the hope ‘that after death there is no other life / not even the expanse of white they see or / the blinding flash of light make any sense –.’ This is a fragmented, non-linear journey, stripped of almost all capital letters and punctuation marks because,
1) this is how the poet liberates herself from grammatical and syntactic rules;
2) there are already a lot of scars on her body; why should she scar the lines and stanzas on paper too?
Ellul defies the very concept of a traditional bound book, dedicating a loose sheet of white paper to each poem, granting me complete freedom in how I choose to read them. I follow the white. Hand in hand with the poet, I wander in and out of each poem, uncovering ‘the diaphragm of days’ and embarking on a journey through the poet’s story as a woman, starting at the precise moment of entering the world and continuing until the day she chooses to take herself out of it.