Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Now out from Otoliths— Grzegorz Wróblewski's A Marzipan Factory



A Marzipan Factory
Grzegorz Wróblewski
(translated from the Polish by Adam Zdrodowski)
112 pages
Otoliths, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-9807651-1-3
$15.95 + p&h
URL: http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/a-marzipan-factory/11184884

A Marzipan Factory is the most original and enticing book of poems I have read in years. It is Kafkaesque and yet tender, cynical and yet warm, elliptical and yet wholly immediate. Grzegorz Wróblewski can take the most ordinary of phenomena and then give them the twist of a knife: to "spare" the life of a living organism—a "dry" tangerine for instance—is, from another angle, to forget it. The pleasures and terrors of sex, of age, of the fear of death, of the deceptions of our social life, have rarely been so brutally—yet wittily and charmingly—documented as they are in these short, often gnomic poems, surprisingly well rendered in Adam Zdrodowski’s translation. Grzegorz Wróblewski restores one’s faith in the power of lyric poetry to renew itself. — Marjorie Perloff

Grzegorz Wróblewski's poems are ironic and serious, quick and probing, nailed to place and character but soaring in imagination. If you haven't read his poems, it's not too late to start and this new volume is the perfect place to do that. — John Z. Guzlowski

A Marzipan Factory is also available through Amazon.

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