by Tadeusz Dąbrowski
tr. by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Tadeusz Dąbrowski’s poetry is as beguiling, reflective and precise as a thousand fragments of a shattered mirror. The poet is properly suspicious of the ambiguities concealed in all language: “very dangerous to know/too many words.//Each of them has its/fl ip side, which/also has its flip side/and so on ad infinitum.” Whether gazing at art or looking at laundry, meditating on our cravings for bread or literature, the poems move effortlessly between the mundane and the exalted, suggesting that the messiness of human experience, its visceral realities, the carnal truths of the body, our small joys and inevitable decay, are all part of the same fragile narrative. This poetry, masterfully translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, moves intimately through spaces sacred and profane, suggesting we are never fully in one world or the other but ever adrift in between.

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Tadeusz Dąbrowski

Tadeusz Dąbrowski is a poet, essayist, critic, and editor-in-chief of the literary bimonthly Topos. He has been published in The New Yorker, Paris Review, Boston Review, Threepenny Review, Ploughshares, Agni, American Poetry Review, Poetry Daily, Guernica, among others. Recipient of stipends awarded by Yaddo (2015), the Omi International Arts Center (NY, 2013), and the Vermont Studio Center (2011). Winner of numerous awards, among others, the Kościelski Prize (2009), the Hubert Burda Prize (2008) and, from Tadeusz Różewicz, the Prize of the Foundation for Polish Culture (2006). He has been nominated for NIKE Award (2010). His work has been translated into 30 languages. Author of nine volumes of poetry in his native Polish and a dozen in translation. He has also published a novel, Bezbronna kreska (2016) [Defenceless line], set in New York City, and a collection of essays on poetry, entitled In Metaphor (2024). Two of his collections, Black Square and POSTS, have been published in English by Zephyr Press. He lives in Gdańsk on the Baltic coast of Poland.

Antonia Lloyd-Jones                      

Antonia Lloyd-Jones has translated works by many of Poland’s leading contemporary novelists and reportage authors, as well as classics, biographies, essays, crime fiction, poetry and children’s books. Her notable translations include Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by 2018 Nobel Prize laureate Olga Tokarczuk. Her most recent work includes My Name is Stramer, a novel by Mikołaj Łoziński, and as compiler and co-translator, The Penguin Book of Polish Short Stories.

“Simply one of the most substantial and powerful poets emerging from Europe as a whole, Tadeusz Dąbrowski is a figure who is climbing toward worldwide prominence.”

—SJ Fowler, 3 AM Magazine