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EAST & WEST

EAST & WEST

$18.00Price

ISBN: 978-0-9908193-6-3

Pub Date: Mar. 2016

Pages: 68


By Piotr Florczyk


Each day we wake and begin an interior dialogue about what is ethical and what is tolerable on this planet. Poet and translator Piotr Florczyk demonstrates in his lyrical evocations what that conversation might look like as he negotiates the distance between urban and wild, settled and migrant, Krakow and Los Angeles. Piotr Florczyk’s literary elders showed us all how to think wisely, deeply, and with dark humor, about the last hundred years, and now Florczyk himself leads us boldly forward into the 21st century, weaving those very same gifts into fabulist’s miniatures of wonder and play.

—Sandra Alcosser, author of A Fish to Feed All Hunger


Drawn in lines that transcend all physical laws, then drawn in lines that attend to such painful, blessed limits, East & West is a gorgeous testament to the glory of being alive. It’s a rare poet who truly widens our vision of the human, who can give us an honest hope, despite it all, despite it all . . . and Piotr Florczyk belongs to this rarity.

—Katie Ford, author of Blood Lyrics and Deposition


    Beneath the deceptive, plain speech of Piotr Florczyk’s best poems lies a jarring assessment of American society that only a poet fluent in two tongues might tell: a backyard where field mice show up with “BB gunshot wounds,” where newlyweds bring “suitcases full of sticks, tin foil scraps, dead flies,” and where under the “quilt of lawn” one finds “hands waving in the air.” We discover that within our once pastoral life, “No one complains if, out of / boredom, I slingshot rocks at their windows, but when I stagger with a story of the sun / climbing a fire escape in the rain, they ask not for the ending but for silence, something / like a furrow or a dagger.” East & West is an outstanding book

    —Mark Irwin, author of American Urn: Selected Poems (1987-2014)


    Piotr Florczyk was born and raised in Kraków, Poland, and moved to the United States at the age of sixteen. He is the author of Barefoot, a chapbook of poems, as well as Los Angeles Sketchbook, a volume of brief essays and photographs. He has also translated/co-translated seven collections of Polish poetry. After earning his MFA from San Diego State University in 2006, he taught at numerous colleges and universities, and now studies in the PhD in Literature and Creative Writing Program at the University of Southern California.

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