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Poetry. Translated from the Polish by Piotr Florczyk. "'War made me another person, ' said Anna wirszczy ska. BUILDING THE BARRICADE is the outcome of that change in that it took thirty years for these experiences to find their way into language. But the poem is also, undoubtedly, an agent of change, for us well as her. Stanza by stanza we see the speaker transformed, stripped of anything but the terrible truths she is recording." Eavan Boland"
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. As a former world-ranked swimmer whose journey toward naturalization and U.S. citizenship began with a swimming fellowship, Piotr Florczyk reflects on his own adventures in swimming pools while taking a closer look at artists, architects, writers, and others who have helped to cement the swimming pool's prominent and iconic role in our society and culture. Swimming Pool explores the pool as a place where humans seek to attain the unique union between mind and body. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.
Poetry. Translated from the Polish by Piotr Florczyk. Born in Gliwice in 1946, Julian Kornhauser is one of the most acclaimed figures of Polish poetry writing today. A major figure of the New Wave movement of the 1970s, he has published eight books since the mid-1990s. This debut collection of his work in English, which draws exclusively on three recent volumes and presents the poems in a new arrangement, touches upon most, if not all, of Kornhauser's major subject matters, formal strategies, and thematic concerns, giving American readers the opportunity to discover one of Poland's most important contemporary writers in Piotr Florczyk's splendid translations.
Poetry. Bilingual Edition. Translated from the Polish by Piotr Florczyk. "At the start of this book you will find one of my favorite poems from contemporary Poland, 'My Wife's Spine.' 'And when my wife's pregnant / her spine is a bough of an apple tree, ' Jaros aw Miko ajewski begins, innocently enough, and then: 'On nights of animal love / it is the zipper in a suitcase / that won't close, even under a knee' and wow, we say, just about to take a surprised breath, when a poet surprises us again: 'On nights of human love / it is the steel rope / at the highest voltage, ' and he goes on, with each metaphor more unpredictable than the previous: 'On the noon walk / my wife's spine is the flag / ...
In Broken Ground, William Logan explores the works of canonical and contemporary poets, rediscovering the lushness of imagination and depth of feeling that distinguish poetry as a literary art. The book includes long essays on Emily Dickinson’s envelopes, Ezra Pound’s wrestling with Chinese, Robert Frost’s letters, Philip Larkin’s train station, and Mrs. Custer’s volume of Tennyson, each teasing out the depths beneath the surface of the page. Broken Ground also presents the latest run of Logan’s infamous poetry chronicles and reviews, which for twenty-five years have bedeviled American verse. Logan believes that poetry criticism must be both adventurous and forthright—and that ...
Poetry. Jewish Studies. What good luck to finally have in English the writings of the brilliant Jerzy Ficowski, the poet who lived at least seventeen lives, fighting in the Warsaw Uprising, and later traveling for years with the Roma people through the roads of Poland, opposing his government, and watching the authorities ban his poems, a poet who translated from Spanish and Romanian and Yiddish and Roma, but most of all from the tongue of silence...Beautifully translated by Jennifer Grotz and Piotr Sommer, these poems also document the tragedy of the Holocaust, with the direct and uncompromising voice with which he reminds us of the great poets such as Różewicz and Świrszczyńska, while ...
Born of hours spent watching and listening to the testimonies of Polish Holocaust survivors and those who came to their aid, these poems by noted Polish poet Piotr Florczyk document the unspeakable evil unleashed by the Nazis in Poland, while also interrogating the very concept of memory literature. With fewer and fewer Holocaust survivors living among us each year, From the Annals of Kraków retells their stories of persecution, perseverance, and luck so they will continue to be heard and will keep alive the memory of survivors' suffering and bravery.
Literary Nonfiction. From LA SKETCHBOOK: "Which is why iths time for me to move to the steps outside my front door, where I can enjoy the breeze that comes and goes as it wishes. Too bad houses in California have no basements, where it's always cooler; if they did, I would break into one now. It's so hot that I can't even hide in my bedroom, which is located on the second level of our apartment, and includes just one window, which is more like an arrowslit, that's how tiny and useless it is. Not only does it not let an adequate amount of fresh air in—and what does blow inside is mostly dust and soot—it hardly provides any daylight, forcing us to turn on the light even when sunshine reigns outside. To have to turn on the light during the day in sunny Southern California pretty much fits the definition of 'tragedy.'"
Described as 'a rich, reverberative dance with memories of a haunted city' ( LA Times), the poems of the prize-winning debut Dancing in Odessa by Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic, draw on archetype, myth and Russian literary figures. Tightly realised domestic settings are invigorated with a contemporary relevance, humour and torment, and a distinctive, transcendent music. 'With his magical style in English, Kaminsky's poems in Dancing in Odessa seem like a literary counterpart to Chagall in which laws of gravity have been suspended and colors reassigned, but only to make everyday reality that much more indelible. His imagination is so transformative that we respond with equal measures of grief and exhilaration.' The American Academy of Arts and Letters ' Dancing in Odessa by Ilya Kaminsky tops the list because he is one of those rarest of finds in this or any century, a writer who establishes what poetry can be.' The New York Times