About the Book
Infinite Zero, the debut full-length poetry collection from Peter Burzyński, is a book of poetry that celebrates and indulges its own tragedies. It is a neo-baroque grotesque expression of vulnerability brimming with playful language that simultaneously burns and soothes. At the center of these poems there is a nobody longing for any and everything. There is morose joy and cheerful glumness. There is poetry that tries to break its own lines and still win. It is the beauty of failure.
About the Author :
Peter Burzyński, PhD is the author of the chapbook A Year Alone inside of Woodland Pattern (Adjunct Press, 2022) and the translator of Martyna Buliżańska's This Is My Earth (New American Press, 2019). He is currently working on translations of the Polish poets Grzegorz Wróblewski, Anna Matysiak, and Joanna Guzik. His poetry, translations, reviews, and essays have appeared in The Georgia Review, jacket2, The Brooklyn Rail, jubilat, RHINO, Storm Cellar, Thrush, Prick of the Spindle, Prelude, Your Impossible Voice, and Forklift Ohio, among others. In Fall 2023 Burzyński served as the Postdoctoral Fulbright Scholar in the Slovak Republic teaching graduate courses in literature. He is the son of immigrants who call him on the phone every day.
Review :
"Peter Burzyński's poems burn like the snow. Metaphor bypassing thought and laid directly on the heart. Enjambments drawing a fragile melody with the measure of a marble rolling down a staircase into meaning. It's beautiful to hold these pieces of filigree life for however long it takes them to play. His poems are balloons, or planets, each a precise world - poignantly funny, tossed up in experiment. Fables for our cracked world. 'Do you feel me?' Reading Burzyński's poems feels like discovering poetry again, smoking a cigarette at the airport in the first snow, and you're young. At the bottom of this swirling book: hope-just like at the bottom of love." - Ana Bozičevic, author of New Life (Wave Books, 2023)
"In Infinite Zero Peter Burzyński deftly blends his proclivities for the surreal, absurd, and grotesque; wit, irony, and humor; and inventive, nuanced language play ('Capitalism is/Over-/stock-/Holm Sin-drone') in an exploration of our exile, under brute capitalism, from ourselves as we have known them, from our own bodies, and from the places we've called home, now 'stolen halls filled with hungry birds and flags perpetually frozen, at half-mast' in 'an era of empty bottles, of sweetened swine.' It's as if the son of Wislawa Szymborska and Czeslaw Milosz met Charles Simic and Ted Berrigan for drinks in a bar, and Danill Kharmes or Allen Ginsberg sauntered over and pulled up a chair every so often. Yet they engage in a raucous conversation all Burzyński's own. They meet in a world of his invention where 'every petunia [is] a parabola, /each house key a colossus, /a scarf a sarcophagus, every/telephone a thunderstorm.' You will be met with surprises at every turn, as you wander through this labyrinthian collection with its 'beautiful catastrophes/and strophes and tropes of the ugly/sublime.' And when you exit, you'll want to turn around and walk right back in." - Brenda Cárdenas, Wisconsin Poet Laureate, author of Trace (Red Hen Press, 2023)
"To anyone who's had their fill of poetry that seems content merely to sing, allow me to recommend Peter Burzyński's Infinite Zero. Here are poems that huff and growl (and even sing!) as they lurch decadently down paths littered with 'rhinestone condoms, ' 'sexy / little skeletons, ' and 'a whole team / of Calibans.' They're wistfully vulgar, ecstatically morose, worshipfully irreverent-which is to say, a constellation's worth of contradictions, like 'two express trains / kissing each other / on the lips.' For every 'glob / of fermented poutine' in this endearingly unruly smorgasbord of a book, there's a flicker of touching vulnerability; for every 'bushel of tongue, ' a flash of hard-earned yet humble wisdom." - Mark Bibbins, author of 13th Balloon (Copper Canyon Press, 2020)
