A Calligraphy of Days

The poet pulls to pieces various kinds of ideologies, possibly the most repulsive of them being the patchwork of consumerism and religion. Ever excellent in his technique, he takes aim at the hollow religious idiom and sets a ravenous language against it. Under such pressure, clerical paraphernalia fall into confusion. Deprived of the signified, they resemble dirty, forlorn bus stops with blurred timetables. * Marek Olszewski * I have no doubt that the book is a breakthrough. And not only for Siwczyk and his work. I have the impression that it might involve a specific segment of contemporary Polish poetry. Revaluation? I do not know. I would prefer not to abuse the term. However, what we are dealing with in this poem is an attempt to sum up, organise, evaluate, and to look anew not only at poetry but also at real life and the life in words. A poet who has already written quite a few books (and not just poetry books) now begins to browse through himself. A poet who has already received many significant awards now begins to notice other orders which had thus far remained tangential to his interests. * Piotr Kepinski * A new quality in the work of a poet of established literary merit, one recognized not only as the author of two decades worth of poetry collections and labeled as the voice of the MTV generation, but also as a literary critic, a cultural activist, a publisher, and even an actor. * Jury of the Koscielski Prize *

Krzysztof Siwczyk is an award-winning poet, critic, and essayist from Poland. He has published over fourteen volumes of poetry, and his work has been translated into numerous languages, including Italian, French, and German. He lives in Gliwice, Poland, and works at the Rafal Wojaczek Institute in Mikolw. Piotr Florczyk is an award-winning poet and translator of a dozen volumes of contemporary Polish poetry. He teaches global literary studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. Alice-Catherine Carls is Tom Elam Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Tennessee at Martin. She is a translator from Polish and English into French and from French into English.