“A poet’s job is to write,” says Julia Fiedorczuk in the closing poem of Psalms. But she far surpasses that modest goal: this volume sings. Translator Bill Johnston masterfully captures the rhythm, cadence, and flow of Fiedorczuk’s Polish poems for English-language readers.

Friday, February 9th, 2024 | 10:00 AM – 10:30 AM

Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference | Book signing (“Psalms”)
Bookfair (booths 637, 635) | Kansas City 

Monday, February 12th, 2024 | 5:00 PM – 6:30 PM
Indiana University | BloomingtonReading/conversation about “Psalms” (2023) and “Dom Oriona” (2023), moderated by prof. Bill Johnston

Thursday, February 15th, 2024 | 5:30 PM – 7:30 PM
Brock University | Performance Studio C, Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts | Canada with Lisa Robertson, reading + lecture on the poetics of the Anthropocene, moderated by prof. Adam Dickinson

About the Book: Julia Fiedorczuk was inspired by her readings of the original Hebrew Psalms, as well as by the process of learning to sing. In her poems she captures the heartache and joy of the Biblical Psalms, but in the context of modern life. She addresses climate change, loss of biodiversity, the upheavals of migration, and, in her most recent poems, the return of war to Europe: “Even when bombs are falling you ought to write / perhaps even especially when people lost / in the woods are saying cold, she is so cold.” Fiedorczuk writes of the natural world, the built environment, motherhood, brotherhood, and of vast and tiny passages of time. And as she does, she discovers a new voice, singing to soothe and inspire.

Julia Fiedorczuk (she/her) was awarded the Szymborska Prize, Poland’s most prestigious poetry award, for Psalmy (Psalms), and has received many other honors. The author of six volumes of poetry, two novels, a collection of short stories, and three critical books, Fiedorczuk is a professor of American studies and a cofounder of the Environmental Humanities Center at Warsaw University. Her poems have been translated into many languages.

Jeffrey Gray, professor emeritus at Seton Hall University, is a scholar of U.S. poetry, postcolonial literature, and literary theory. He is the author of Mastery’s End: Travel and Postwar American Poetry and of many articles on American and Latin American literature. His poetry has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Yale Review, the Atlantic, Triquarterly, Western Humanities Review, and elsewhere. He is also the editor or co-editor of several anthologies, including A Companion to American Poetry, and lives in Ocean Grove, New Jersey, and Alghero, Sardinia.