“[S]training at particles of light in the midst of darkness,” John Keats writes in a letter to his brother George in the last autumn of his life. Reading Ariane Dreyfus’s poetry taken from The Last Children’s Book, adeptly translated from the French by Elaine Terranova, we glimpse those particles through strangely unsettling and impactful language, journeying through some perilous terrain such as female circumcision, not often encountered in poems based in childhood. The narration is dramatic, sensitively rendered and viscerally felt in their close range view as they come “between the rails” to a place of redemption that is keenly felt but measured.
Eloy Cichocka’s poems throb with tension. They come from her recent book image/ may/contain, which explores how “reality” gets represented in our era of algorithms and AI. What does it mean to “witness” a disaster like a tsunami or hurricane? How can poetry, via these mediated images, avoid the expected and instead locate the idiosyncratic?
Each poem is called a loop (in Polish the word “pętla” is also used for the terminus of trams). The construction of these texts is based on mathematical formulas. Just like in a rhizomatic texts Eloy Cichocka repeats various formulas generated by the internet but she also includes news of Ukrainian refugees in Poland. Amid mathematically generated formulas, poignant images of the war in Ukraine create even more pain and bewilderment.
The movement between generated text and the authentic heartbeat of human suffering has a powerful impact.
We are so pleased to feature this work.
–Barbara Siegel Carlson & Ewa Chrusciel
Barbara Siegel Carlson is the author of What Drifted Here (Cherry Grove, 2023), Once in Every Language (Kelsay, 2017) and Fire Road (Dream Horse, 2013). She is the co-translator (with Ana Jelnikar) of Look Back, Look Ahead, Selected Poems of Srečko Kosovel and co-editor (with Richard Jackson) of A Bridge of Voices: Contemporary Slovene Poetry and Perspectives. Her poetry, translations and essays have appeared in Verse Daily, Cortland Review, Mid-American Review, Salamander, Slovene Studies and elsewhere. Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart prizes. A fourth book of poems The Current is forthcoming in 2026.
Ewa Chrusciel is a poet, translator, and educator. She has four books of poems in English with Omnidawn Press: Yours, Purple Gallinule (2022), Strata, Of Annunciations, Contraband of Hoopoe, as well as three books in Polish: Tobołek, Sopiłki, and Furkot. Her book Contraband of Hoopoe was translated into Italian by Anna Aresi and came out in Italy with Edizioni Ensemble in May 2019. Her poems have been included in curricula at institutions such as Harvard University, University of Wisconsin, Dartmouth College, Salem State University.
She also translated various authors into Polish, including books by Jack London, Joseph Conrad, and I.B. Singer, as well as book of selected poems by Jorie Graham (2013), and aforthcoming book of selected poems by Vievee Francis (2027), and selected poems of Kazim Ali, Lyn Hejinian, Cole Swensen, Mathew Olzmann and other American poets.
She is a Professor of Creative and Professional Writing and M. Roy London Endowed Chair at Colby-Sawyer College.
