Published 30th September by Holland House Books

It isn’t exaggeration to say Deliverance is pioneering; it is a book of design, of illustration, a collaboration built upon a dynamic exchange across mediums; a collection of photopoetry, of image and poem, each elevating the other; all speaking with immediacy to what can be gleaned from personal experience.

— SJ Fowler, poet, writer, organiser of European Poetry Festival in the UK

Anna Błasiak’s poetry book has kicked me where it hurts. These are moving poems about discrimination on many levels, but also about love and finding oneself. Deliverance is a liberation, an unmasking, beautifully complemented by Lisa Kalloo’s photographic collages.

— Wioletta Greg, poet, novelist, longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize (2017) and shortlisted to the Griffin Poetry Prize (2015)

The angry but also passionate strength of the text overflows and needs more idioms, mother tongues and artistic languages. Or maybe it’s more correct to say that in the Anna Blasiak’s and Lisa Kalloo’s work all the borders are systematically disrupted, in the form (the borders between English and Polish, as well as between poetry and photography, as well as graphics) and in the substance.

The book is not just a story or a denunciation, or a path to the deliverance of the title. It is an experience that is offered to us, which immediately swallows us up. We have to live it together with the authors as if we were given no other choice.

The atmosphere is a sinister and dark one – of Nosferatu or of the cruel Grimm’s tales – those vortices that suck you in and into which you slip, like in Escher’s drawings. The structure is that of dreams, or rather of nightmares; you sink into them and proceed by associations, and there is no escape until you wake up. Images, gothic and twilight photos, and words interpenetrate each other and create a unique texture, dark and shining, a stream of consciousness, now painful, now frightening, now bitter and even sarcastic, with a very fast rhythm. There is also a love poem, a passionate reminiscent of the Song of Songs, there is a violent male’s world, the narrow-mindedness of a ghettoizing society, the push to deny rights and the longing to live with bright naturalness, to grow up queer, to have the liberty to love and live according to one’s identity and to belong on normal terms, without any stigmas.

To “run through the night” becomes a need, as it is taking a common deliverance path for several women and generations. And other barriers fall between the “I” of the poems’ author, her memories and referencing of several other stories, women writers and works, as if she wanted in this way to involve all the women of the book in an embrace, that end up absorbing them in herself.

Night and breath are key words, maybe also because the text was conceived in the Covid period. But here the breath is what you conquer when you wake up from the apnea of the nightmare. And that widens and loosens when you return home. In the book the home to which one returns is one’s own being and the real deliverance comes on the last page, but only for those who “ran crossing all the night” putting it behind with the authors.

— Laura Fusco, poet, author of Liminal, Nadir and Elle

A series of poems about growing up queer in Poland in the 1980s. Deliverance has a narrative angle and explores themes of gender identity, LGBTQ rights, coming out, homophobia, women’s rights etc, at the same time being mainly based on the author’s family/societal history/background. The book has been written bilingually, in Polish and in English. The idea is that a reader can read each poem in either of the languages or in both of them simultaneously. The author has been exploring different techniques to achieve this result: mirroring, intertwining, playing on sounds in both languages. This is her attempt of showing the reality of somebody living between the languages, sometimes stretched between them – of somebody who, originally from Poland, has lived in the UK for over 20 years and who, as a translator, works in both of those languages on an everyday basis.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Anna Błasiak is a poet and translator. She has translated over 40 books from English into Polish and some fiction and poetry from Polish into English. In addition to her book-length translations, her work has been published in Best European Fiction 2015, Asymptote, The Guardian, B O D Y Literature, Modern Poetry in Translation and York Literary Review. More: annablasiak.com.

Lisa Kalloo is an emerging queer, BAME, British artist/photographer of Indian/West Indian heritage. She studied law but moved away from it. In her photography she explores different cultures. More at lisakalloophotography.co.uk