Abstract This essay examines several recurring themes, references, and poetic tropes in Anna Frajlich's poetry, to establish how her personal experience of exile and dislocation shapes and enriches her poetic universe. It focuses on the poet's treatment of space, time, memory, human relations, and the nagging sense of incompleteness often expressed by her lyrical personae. The essay combines historical and structural analysis of the main features of Frajlich's poetry, paying special attention to the prosodic organization of her verse, types of poetic diction, the intermittent use of traditional and innovative poetic forms to show that the poet's work, though highly diverse in form and content, inclines toward the “classical” model of expression characterized by a sense of poise, emotional restraint, and search for order, while at the same time avoiding intellectual and moral aloofness, didacticism, abstractness usually associated with “classicist” literary style. Frajlich's poetry acknowledges life's confusion without yielding to it, resists chaos without denying its presence in our lives. Her personal experience presents itself primarily as a heightened sensitivity to all forms of discord and discontinuity in the lives of people, communities, and nations. Born of a “wound,” it surmounts a personal tale of anguish and alienation, and forges it into a universal tale of the modern human condition. An escape, an exile from home, a painful dislocation, self-doubt, and uncertainty, is transformed into what the poet calls a “perfect journey” of self-affirmation, self-renewal, and intellectual as well as emotional discovery.