"Memories Pretend to Sleep wrestles with making a life and a home in both a place and a language ... Julia Gjikas poems are crystalline, fierce, in moments melancholy and indicting, in moments questioning and longing ... Always, in each one, pulses a smoldering sense of aliveness." -- Nina Maclaughlin, The Boston Globe
"Julia Gjika turns her poems into small pocket mirrors, where time and again each person, particularly women, sees their own expansive world with all its natural cracks, together with the blossomings of love and family." -- Petraq Risto, Poet
"Julia Gjikas poetry is lyrical, meditative, and characterized by free verse in which thought and feeling alternate as quick jolts to create rhythm. Gjika has remained the poet of vulnerability whose range of emotions well up beneath the surface of self-control and break through with concise and deft expression." -- Klara Kodra, Poet and Literary Critic
"It is nearly impossible to find in the Albanian reality a voice like Julia Gjikas where the inflight turbulence of freedom is so complete and expansive, where a female writer speaks out of the many quotidian pains which constitute a real battlefield. Gjikas poetical coordinates are frequently addressed, but never specific because she is a poet always in transit. Reading her is a way of setting out on an endless journey through years, various continents, cities and small Albanian towns, different times of day. Through her poetry of witness, she awakens us from ourselves, by way of ourselves." -- Natasha Lako, poet and novelist