Jerzy Jarniewicz, one of Poland’s beloved poets and winner of the 2022 Nike Award, and translator Piotr Florczyk present Landless Boys, a debut volume of Jarniewicz’s poems in English. The book was published last year by MadHat Press in a bilingual edition. 

 In Jerzy Jarniewicz’s Landless Boys—which comes to us through Piotr Florczyk’s wonderful English translation—sacrilege and the sacred repeatedly weave through each other. Sex and eros are neither romanticized nor profaned, but simply—and inexorably—present. Grand-scale human thinking becomes diminished by its proximity to daily activity, and private lives exist quietly inside the machinery of history and civilization. By the end, this ambitious, brilliant, understated book has offered an astonishingly broad depiction of human experience—inside of which the individual mind is forever navigating the inescapability of both the body and the present moment. — Wayne Miller

Jerzy Jarniewicz is a Polish poet, translator and literary critic, who teaches at the University of Łódz. He has published twelve volumes of poetry, thirteen critical books on contemporary Irish, British and American literature, and has written extensively for various journals, including Poetry Review, Irish Review, Cambridge Review. He has translated the work of many novelists and poets, including James Joyce, John Banville, Seamus Heaney, Raymond Carver, Philip Roth, Edmund White, Ursula Le Guin, and Derek Walcott. 

Piotr Florczyk is an award-winning poet, critic, and translator. His recent books include Swimming Pool, and Object Lessons title, and the poetry collection From the Annals of Kraków, which is based on the testimonies of Holocaust survivors, as well as numerous volumes of translations. He teaches global literary studies at the University of Washington, and lives with his family in Los Angeles. For more information about him and his work, please visit: www.piotrflorczyk.com