New Polish Writing – serie

Explorations of humans in the natural world using tender, sometimes erotic, always moving language. Julia Fiedorczuk entangles images and concepts from science (astronomy, physics, and biology) with deeply personal explorations of relationships and connectedness in her debut poetry book in English. Nature abounds in these poems, and Fiedorczuk is, in turn, ever present in "that luscious fruit, the world." Her passionate engagement with the details of the environment and the people in it makes hers an unforgettable voice in contemporary ecopoetics, one that argues for empathy and alertness. She has published five volumes of poetry, three of fiction, and three books on ecocriticism, and won several Polish literary awards.

One of the most versatile and rebellious poets in Poland, Świetlicki takes us into streets, cafes, rooms, and conversations where — with his signature dark glasses — he ponders metaphysical questions in the minutiae of daily life. These are poems about life, forgiveness, communication, love, death, and time: in the slit of a mailbox, he sees “Not the light but / the galloping Now.” The poems have an urban edge and bite, and Świetlicki has recorded many of them as lyrics with his rock band. The collection, his first to be translated into English, culls work from all twelve of his published volumes.

The poet brings his fascination with formal poetry to 21st century subjects — internet culture, science, postmodern architecture — even as he also explores intimacy, gay love, and emotionally-charged objects in this bilingual (Polish/English) collection. Dehnel’s range of style and diction includes poems based on the classic Polish thirteen-syllable line and intricate rhyming stanzas, to prose poems and freer lyrics. “My restlessness… is one of my strongest traits—that insatiability for places, books, paintings, people,” he says.

"A vital new poet in the Polish language."-- Adam Zagajewski Tomasz Rozycki's sixth book seems like nothing if not an attempt to grapple with Elizabeth Bishop's question, "Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?" But for Rozycki questions of travel and foreignness are never separate from those of history--personal history, political and national history, the history of things and places and trauma. "Coffee and Cigarettes" When I began to write, I didn't know that poems would transform me, make my skin translucent, I'd become a weary ghost who, sleepless, roams the streets as if to ride a high till coming down, then go to bed with rabid dawn. But light would find me still out wandering and dropping in on friends, flat broke, a louse, a varmint, summoned by your nakedness or even just your sighing. And honey, how was I to know what all these dumb poems would make of me, that you would summon me to life, and thanks to you I would become the visible, in bed beside you, waiting till you fall asleep. Tomasz Rozycki has published six books of poetry, including The Forgotten Keys, winner of the Koscielski Prize.He has been nominated twice for the Nike Prize, Poland's most important literary award. He lives in his hometown, Opole, with his wife and two children. Mira Rosenthal has received NEA and Fulbright grants and held fellowships at the MacDowell Colony and the Vermont Studio Center. Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Ploughshares, The American Poetry Review, Slate, and the Notre Dame Review.