About the Book
The Folding Star and Other Poems is a triumphant collection of poetry that will help change our understanding of Polish poetry in the United States. The steady gaze, surgical precision, and syntactical richness of Gutorow's poems speak to unhurried and lasting meditations, which, in their turn, beg to be revised time and again.
About the Author :
Jacek Gutorow (b. 1970) is a Polish poet, translator, and literary critic. He has published five books of poems, which have recently been collected and published by Biuro Literackie in Nad brzegiem rzeki. Wiersze z lat 1990-2010 (At the River's Edge. Poems 1990-2010). His 1997 volume, Wiersze pod nieobecnosc (Poems in Absentia), was recognized as the most important debut book of the year, receiving the celebrated Kazimiera Ilakowiczówna Award, while his most recent individual collection, Inne tempo (A Different Tempo, 2008), also published by Biuro Literackie, was nominated for the three most significant literary awards in Poland: the Nike Award, the Cogito Award, and the Gdynia Award. His work has been translated into German, Lithuanian, Bulgarian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Czech, and Slovak. Gutorow is also an acclaimed literary critic and translator. He has published five collections of critical essays and won the 2004 Ludwik Fryde Award from the International Association of Literary Critics. His translations include books by Simon Armitage, Wallace Stevens, and Ron Padgett, as well as work by Henry James, John Ashbery, Jorie Graham, and Charles Tomlinson. He has also translated and commented upon such figures as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Jacques Derrida. Jacek Gutorow teaches American and British literature at the University of Opole.
Piotr Florczyk is a poet and translator. With Been and Gone (Marick Press, 2009), he introduced the English-speaking audience to Julian Kornhauser (1946-), one of the foremost Polish poets of the Generation of '68. He is also the translator of a collection of poems by Anna Swir (1909-84), Building the Barricade and Other Poems (Calypso Editions, 2011). His individual poems, translations, and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Slate, Boston Review, Threepenny Review, Pleiades, The Southern Review, Notre Dame Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, America Magazine, New Orleans Review, West Branch, World Literature Today, Cimarron Review, Little Star, and Poetry International, among others. He holds an MFA from San Diego State University, and has taught at the University of Delaware, San Diego State University, and at University of California-Riverside. Piotr Florczyk lives in Los Angeles, California.
Review :
"What is a lyric poem but 'one great abbreviation' of 'The river is looking out for the other shore./Me.' It is with that sort of sly economy that Jacek Gutorow creates his speakers--and raises them up off the flat world of the white page and walks them over to the center of the stage where they stand and give utterance to our shared experiences: we talk, we think, we act, we travel--and we try, over and over again, to give voice to the impossible ineffable--that category that contains everything from the sad fact of wall shadows to the awful chaos of expectations. Jacek Gutorow's poems are Stevensian in their propositions but inimitably his own. We are fortunate to now have them in English so that we who don't read Polish can now read these, and enjoy their insight and wry wit. And their wonderfully distilled new way of saying." --Mary Jo Bang
"There are dreams that are uncertain, wrapped in flux. And then dreams that are more precise and finely hewn than waking life: more mysterious for that, but part of reality, not its other--as sharp and painful as Bergman films. Jacek Gutorow's poems are like this, if far more compact: childhood orchard in a snow globe, recollection as super-realism. This is a remarkable collection of work, with an incomparably sustained emotional tonality: expansive because of its great compression, its moving contradiction. 'At the end / a boy will flaunt the torch /and set the whole world ablaze.' But with poems: a coruscating and cold fire."--Joshua Clover
