Marin Bodakov (1971-2021) was a Bulgarian poet, essayist, critic, journalist and editor, a key figure in the literary life of the country. Delicate and sublime, his short poems can be painfully beautiful and blunt, casually classical, lucid like a song by Arvo Pärt or full of dark wit. Bodakov authored eight volumes of poetry and five volumes of literary criticism, most recently The Gallery of the Heart: Collected Poems, published jointly by DA and Tochitza in 2022. His book, Naïve Art won the Ivan Nikolov national literary award in 2012. In 2014 he received the Knight of the Book award from the Bulgarian Book Association. In 2021 and 2022 he was given two posthumous national literary awards for his cumulative contributions to the Bulgarian literary environment (Peroto and Hristo G. Danov). His poetry has been translated and published in Bengali, Croatian, English, Polish, Macedonian. The Chaos of Desire (Accents Publishing), a volume of Bodakov’s selected and translated poems, was published in the United States in 2024.