In his short life, Srečko Kosovel experimented with a wide variety of styles—impressionist, symbolist, expressionist, futurist, Dadaist, and surrealist—leaving over 1,000 poems as well as prose writings, essays and vignettes totaling several hundred pages. Kosovel’s poetry has been translated into many languages. Look Back, Look Ahead is the first American edition of Kosovel’s selected poetry.

"Srečko Kosovel and Rainer Maria Rilke couldn’t be more different, but they aren't, they're brothers. They died the same year. They worked and lived eight miles apart. One in Duino Castle, the other in Karst. 'Come, you night-wounded man, so I can kiss our heart,' screamed Srečko Kosovel, the greatest Slovenian poet of the twentieth century. At twenty-two, he immolated himself with the torch of his own poems. To read him is like watching Van Gogh's last paintings, to stare at Celan's last drops of life. And yet, he's the threshold, the triumphal arch to this small nation's destiny, the eternal poet of total existence." —TOMAŽ ŠALAMUN

"There is a bold earnestness to Kosovel's poems in Look Back, Look Ahead that seems simultaneously like a bygone time and the expressions of an effusive, eccentric friend. Collectively, the poems defy categorization. Over here he sounds like the eighth century Taoist poet Wang Wei, but on the next page he sounds like what Kafka might have been like as a poet. You might even make the associate to Baudelaire's prose poems. The breadth of Kosovel's poetic registers is only matched by the resourcefulness of his prolific, thrilling insights." —THE LITERARY REVIEW