Alissa Valles is a poet whose work delves into the complexities of identity and memory. Her writing often engages with themes of heritage and belonging, exploring the intricate layers of personal and cultural history. Valles crafts her verses with a keen eye for evocative imagery and intellectual depth, inviting readers into profound explorations of the human condition. Her distinct voice offers a unique perspective on navigating the intersections of past and present.
Exploring the interplay between host and guest, the poems reflect a deep vulnerability and a keen lyrical precision. The author highlights the interconnectedness of cultures and languages in a postmodern context, where identities are fluid and transient. This collection delves into the themes of dependence and shared experiences, emphasizing how these roles shape our understanding of belonging and connection across diverse landscapes.
The collection features a stunning array of lyric poems that delve into the depths of emotional intensity, exploring themes of fear, love, and the resilience found in a cynical understanding of life. Vivid imagery throughout the poems creates lasting impressions, inviting readers to reflect on the complexities of human experience and the ways our bodies respond to profound emotions.
Vivid accounts of life in a Soviet prison camp by the author of Inhuman Land. Interned with thousands of Polish officers in the Soviet prisoner-of-war camp at Starobielsk in September 1939, Józef Czapski was one of a very small number to survive the massacre in the forest of Katyń in April 1940. Memories of Starobielsk portrays these doomed men, some with the detail of a finished portrait, others in vivid sketches that mingle intimacy with respect, as Czapski describes their struggle to remain human under hopeless circumstances. Essays on art, history, and literature complement the memoir, showing Czapski’s lifelong engagement with Russian culture. The short pieces on painting that he wrote while on a train traveling from Moscow to the Second Polish Army’s strategic base in Central Asia stand among his most lyrical and insightful reflections on art.
The first uncensored, English-language translation of a Polish dissident poet's brave act of witness in post-World-War-II Europe. The Polish poet Ryszard Krynicki, born in a Nazi labor camp in Austria in 1943, became one of the most prominent poets of the New Wave generation of 1968, his poetry offering what Adam Michnik has called “a strange and beautiful marriage of Joseph Conrad's heroic ethics with a great metaphysical perspective.” Krynicki is the author of a body of work marked at once by the solitude of a poète maudit and solidarity with a hurt and manipulated community. Our Life Grows, published in Paris in 1978, was the first poetry collection to appear as Krynicki intended, beyond the reach of the Communist censorship that had crippled his earlier books. These poems, combining a biting wit and rigorously questioning mind with a surreal imagination, are a vital part of the story of postwar Europe.