Join us for a genre-bending poetry workshop and book launch celebrating Viscera: Eight Voices from Poland, a new collection of Polish poetry in translation. The events will feature translator Małgorzata Myk, poet Natalia Malek, and editor Mark Tardi. Poetry workshop will be conducted in English, writing prompts will be offered in both English and Polish. Participants are encouraged to pursue questions of translation, language, and form. Both events will include readings and Q&A sessions. Newcomers to poetry, lifelong poets and readers all welcome! 

Viscera presents a selection of work by Polish women writers committed to experimenting with form while shaping vigorous political critiques. As Tardi writes in the Introduction, “Each of the writers’ work in this book frustrates the limits of particular poetic concerns and together their voices comprise an archival octet that hums in ‘the breath’s hidden fissure,’ full of counterpoint, semi-chords and shards, formal daring and unapologetic verve.

In addition, Words Without Borders also had Viscera on their November 2024 Watch List. Details here.

Authors include Anna Adamowicz, Joanna Oparek, Katarzyna Szaulińska, Zofia Skrzypulec, Maria Cyranowicz, Hanna Janczak, Natalia Malek, and Ilona Witkowska; translators include Mark Tardi, Lynn Suh, Małgorzata Myk, and Katarzyna Szuster-Tardi.

You can purchase the book here.

The eight poets selected for the presentation show Polish poetry at its best and most daring… The poets in Viscera speak in an astonishing variety of distinct voices; there are greater differences between them than similarities — what they have in common however is their ‘peripheral’ (in the positive meaning of the word) position: none of them belongs to the literary mainstream, none of them is the media’s darling, most of them are at the beginning of their literary careers, which makes [the] selection highly unique and uncompromising. A pioneering work indeed…

— Jerzy Jarniewicz

Mark Tardi, Małgorzata Myk, Lynn Suh, and Katarzyna Szuster-Tardi have created an exciting translation project that is sorely needed in these times when many geopolitical borders are becoming increasingly impervious and violent. Their miraculous, transnational, collective work offers crucial visibility of Polish women poets who are reshaping the past, present, and future terrains of contemporary Polish poetry.

— Don Mee Choi

This anthology of innovative poetries from contemporary Polish women is vivid, unruly, and captivating: a “celebration of intrusions,” as Maria Cyronwicz writes. The eight poets featured in the collection leap from Polish into English where they refresh readers with their attentions: Cyranowicz notes that even a hair clip can serve as “a disoriented trace in the most difficult language.” Editor Mark Tardi and a team of deft translators bring a formally various range of styles to life here. The originality of the writing cuts through culture and geography creating poems, as Ilona Witkowska asserts, whose  “festoons of lights/are barbed wire.” In an engaging section of poetics statements, Hanna Janczak notes, “I can’t decide. But do I have to?” The answer would seem to be no. Anna Adamowicz, proposing to “dissect each planet like a peach and extract the pit,” makes clear that all things are possible.

— Elizabeth Robinson

I’ve read these poems a lot, mainly one dark night by headlamp in my car in a walmart parking lot in Texas on the eve of the total eclipse. I thought my mother’s first language was polish and I love these poems so much I want to translate them through the body of my dead mother. People who teach should use these viscera, people who sing in front of bands should shout these lyrics, I want to throw away the pressure of nations, why polish poems, but then everything devolves to English. These are far better than American poems I know, better than mine, anything can happen in here and Viscera is a new blank goddess who watches war on their phone, checks the inside of their body in and out till we’re millions of miles into space, and we want to come home, and when we do this is all there is, and it is good.

— Eileen Myles

Natalia Malek is a Polish poet, translator and literary curator. She has published five collections of poetry: Obręcze (2022), Karapaks (2020), Kord (2017), Szaber (2014) and Pracowite popołudnia (2010). Karapaks, her fourth collection, won the 2021 Gdynia Literary Prize–Best Poetry Collection; Kord, her third collection, received the 2017 Adam Włodek Award for Emerging Writers. Her books have been shortlisted for major literary prizes in Poland including the Nike Literary Award, Wisława Szymborska Award and Silesius Poetry Prize. A graduate of English Studies at the University of Warsaw, she has translated American poetry as well as art writing and criticism, occasionally reviewing art exhibitions herself. Her poems have been widely anthologized and translated into more than ten languages. She teaches creative writing and is particularly interested in the intersections of poetry and visual arts.

Małgorzata Myk is the author of the monograph Upping the Ante of the Real: Speculative Poetics of Leslie Scalapino (2019) and co-editor of the Literary and Visual Extremities special issue of the journal Text Matters (2023). Her awards include a Senior Fulbright Award (2024–25) at the University of Utah and a Kosciuszko Foundation Fellowship (2017) at UCSD. Her translations into Polish include the writing of Leslie Scalapino, Divya Victor, and E. Tracy Grinnell, whose poetry was in the anthology Variants of Catching Breath: Five American Voices, edited by Mark Tardi (2022). Pogoda, her translation of Lisa Robertson’s The Weather (Lokator) appeared in 2024. A volume of selected poetry by Kevin Davies in her translation is forthcoming from Disastra Publishing. Her translations of Maria Cyranowicz’s poems have appeared in Modern Poetry in Translation, periodicities, AzonaL, ANMLY and the chapbook”A Species of Least Care (Toad Press/Veliz Books, 2024). She is on faculty at the University of Łódz.

Mark Tardi is a writer and translator whose awards include a 2023 PEN/Heim Translation Grant and a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Translation fellowship. He is the author of three books, most recently, The Circus of Trust (Dalkey Archive Press, 2017), and his translations of The Squatters’ Gift by Robert Rybicki (Dalkey Archive Press) and Faith in Strangers by Katarzyna Szaulińska (Toad Press/Veliz Books) were published in 2021. Recent writing and translations have appeared in Poetry, Conjunctions, Guernica, ANMLY, Interim, Cagibi, Denver Quarterly, and in the anthology The Experiment Will Not Be Bound (Unbound Edition Press, 2023). Unsovereign by Kacper Bartczak (above/ground press) and Viscera: Eight Voices from Poland (Litmus) were published in 2024. He is on faculty at the University of Łódź.