The poet brings his fascination with formal poetry to 21st century subjects ― internet culture, science, postmodern architecture ― even as he also explores intimacy, gay love, and emotionally-charged objects in this bilingual (Polish/English) collection. Dehnel’s range of style and diction includes poems based on the classic Polish thirteen-syllable line and intricate rhyming stanzas, to prose poems and freer lyrics. ‘My restlessness… is one of my strongest traits―that insatiability for places, books, paintings, people,’ he says.

Read Sasha Dugdale’s review for Riveting Reviews

Jacek Dehnel, born in 1980, is a poet, novelist and translator. In 2005 he was one of the youngest winners of the Kościelski Prize for promising new writers. He has published five volumes of poetry and nine of prose. His first novel, Lala, tells the story of his grandmother’s life. His second, Saturn, is based on the life of Francisco Goya, and depicts his painful relationship with his son. His third, Mother Makryna, tells the true story of a nineteenth-century fraudster who claimed to be an oppressed Catholic nun. His most recent novel, Krivoklat is the monologue of a lunatic compelled to destroy great works of art.

Several of Dehnel’s books have been translated into foreign languages. Available in English are the novels Saturn (translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Dedalus 2012) and forthcoming Lala (translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Oneworld Publications 2018) as well as Six Polish Poets, an anthology which Jacek himself edited for Arc Publications (2009).

With Piotr Tarczyński he is co-author of two crime novels set in turn-of-the-century Krakow, whose crime-solving heroine is a bored professor’s wife and first-class busybody.

Aperture
By Jacek Dehnel
Translated by Karen Kovacik
Published by Zephyr Press
Publication date: July 2018
ISBN 978-1938890949
Order online