“[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
