Building the Barricade and Other Poems of Anna Swir

Poetry. Bilingual Edition. Translated from the Polish by Piotr Florczyk. Foreword by Jericho Brown. "In the same way that memory gave birth to the muses, Anna Swir crafted exquisite mnemonic miniatures thirty years after the Warsaw Uprising, miniatures that allowed human hope to shine through bloody rubble. Reading Swir, one longs to know this heroic poet, who, like Whitman, nursed humans broken by war. Piotr Florczyk translates the poems in BUILDING THE BARRICADE with chilling precision, constructing equations that become magical spells to address the twentieth century and serve as cautionary tales for the twenty-first."—Sandra Alcosser

"To translate Anna Swir is to translate a cemetery's stories as nakedly and starkly as any human can. It is to tread on hallowed, stunned ground—the ground of an earth stricken not by its own nature but by our species' own warring, bombarding instincts. Only reverence could lead someone properly into the reaches of Swir's numbed witness of the atrocities of WWII. Piotr Florczyk has the reverence and skill to bring Swir into English verse with crystalline witness and warnings."—Katie Ford

"These short poems by Anna Swir, keenly translated by Piotr Florczyk, have the urgency and clarity of a poet staring back at a burning building from which she somehow escaped, except the building is Poland and she is looking back in memory, talking to its war-torn corpses, and to us, the lucky recipients of these explosive poems.—Edward Hirsch