A few students called out other possible countries, but Peter Breznik (he says we can call him Peter, but even saying his name in my head renders the roof of my mouth numb) had returned to perusing his anthology. “Yugoslavia,” he said, and conversation halted, as though he had just said “Saturn.” Clearly, no one had expected the easygoing poet-historian to be from a country known mainly, if at all, for being wedged within a hotbed of communist and post-communist countries.
