I can hear the song that plays in Dario’s heart now. The words in these poems are cosmic and uncontrollable, and if you take off the headphones and look out the window, you’ll hear it too. The roar is holy and prophetically terrifying.

— Scott Laudati, author of Play the Devil

Stop on by Auntie's to chat with poet Dario Cvencek about his poetry collections, PTSD Martini and Mirror Made of Words, and grab a signed copy!

This event is free and open to the public.

About PTSD Martini

PTSD Martini is a collection of poetry that explores the overarching themes of war, trauma, healing, gun violence, immigration, and identity. The poems in this collection seek to capture the emotional range of war and immigrant experiences, interweaving Slavic folklore, war diaries, and uniquely Balkan stories of love and loss. The result is a hard-earned celebration of resilience and the beauty evident in even harshest of situations. The poems are often presented from a perspective of a child, yet are bold and contemporary enough in a sense that they pose some provocative ethical questions, especially in the context of immigrant (non)adjustment to life in modern-day America. These observations are offered to the reader as a testament of a tender healing journey, with some universal, introspective insights.

About Mirror Made of Words

Mirror Made of Words is a collection of poetry that explores the overarching themes of self-reflection and self-discovery. These are poems about the search for meaning, love, pain, healing, self-acceptance, nature, and growth. They seek to question, challenge, deconstruct, illuminate, and uplift. The verses are the authors’ enclave through the identity storms needed for the process of integration to take its course. Laid out bare are the emotional and philosophical struggles of the narrator, whose voice is at times curiously tender, and at times prophetically harsh. The emotions are often expressed meta-physically, with vivid comparisons. An emphasis is placed on the rhythm and the sound patterns to accentuate moods; sublime and spiritual, the words in and of themselves strive to make music.

About the author

Dario Cvencek is an immigrant poet from the Balkans and a research scientist at the University of Washington. Drawing on a childhood shaped by war, his work explores the stubborn presence of love amid displacement and trauma, reflecting a journey of healing and reclaimed identity. By day he studies how children construct identity. By night—or by whatever hour the poem arrives—he writes about the slow, stubborn work of rebuilding a self in a new language. His words have appeared in Rattle, Zone 3, Hobart, and numerous other independent literary magazines and presses. His debut full-length collection, PTSD Martini (Carbonation Press, 2025), explores war, displacement, trauma, and immigration, asking how those experiences shape identity. His follow-up collection, Mirror Made of Words (2026), asks what happens after survival—how joy, love, curiosity, nature, and self-discovery find their way back. He started writing poetry as a teenager during the Bosnian War. He has not stopped.