Dear Beloved Humans

Description

A representative selection from the distinguished poet, showing the remarkable scope and variety of his work.

Dear Beloved Humans offers a representative selection of poems by Grzegorz Wróblewski (b. 1962), a Polish writer and visual artist based for the last thirty-five years in Copenhagen. A third volume of Wróblewski’s poetry translated into English by Piotr Gwiazda, it shows its remarkable scope and variety, from the early 1980s poems, with their motifs of existential anxiety and radical estrangement, to those written in the last decade, with their satirical insights on nationalism and capitalism, among other topics. Above all Dear Beloved Humans signals that Wróblewski’s work should be read as a dynamic whole. It crystallizes the nature of his lifelong project: an attempt to portray, through something theoretically as simple and unassuming as poetry, what it means to be alive at this moment in the planet’s history. Incisive, uncompromising, yet also full of what Sharon Mesmer calls Wróblewski’s “melancholic hilarity,” Dear Beloved Humans is a document of our time and a not-so-hopeful message to our descendants.

Poetry.

“In this book we find short brilliant grim verse tales—such as the tale of Anne who lives inside her white dress, or that of the poet who is the only one (including former cosmonauts!) remaining unconverted. Poem by poem we move through an inexorably dark circle of life, where poems’ speakers are in the process of disappearing faster and faster; where it feels like rain especially when it’s not raining and the weather generally is sexless and gray, uninspiring; where decline is described somberly yet shouted IN ALL CAPS; where a tick chose to bite you because you wore the flannel shirt the poem’s addressee had given as a birthday gift; where the gecko is perfect for loners. After a week of all this, the gecko poem informs us, “you’ll become social again,” but by then it will be marvelously too late. Grzegorz Wróblewski is the great sweetly sardonic poet of such humane belatedness.”—Al Filreis

“The amazingly compressed poems in Dear Beloved Humans are constantly banging themselves against this world that makes no sense, but that most of us have nevertheless simply accepted, and Wróblewski has taken on the poetic task of jarring us into a renewed apprehension of the world’s terrible, hilarious absurdity. “What took place a moment ago / no longer has any importance,” he says — not when we’re utterly surrounded by the horrors of history, hunger, aging, lust, and endless wars “they all” lose “but claim / they won.” Wróblewski’s pessimism is fantastic, entertaining, and timeless. I laughed out loud while reading this book, then got up from my chair feeling truly shaken.”—Wayne Miller

Author Bio