By Grzegorz Wróblewski
Translated from the Polish by Piotr Gwiazda
Publication Date: May 9, 2017
Paperback: 978-1-944700-12-6
Description
This collection of poems from one of Poland’s major contemporary writers, Grzegorz Wróblewski, demonstrates his characteristic virtues: anthropological focus, objectivist detachment (though not without hallucinatory interference), minimalistic precision. But it also signals the presence of new elements. One of them is an extensive reliance on found language, the preferred mode of Anglophone conceptual writers, here acquiring a distinctly Eastern European flavor. Another is his candor, which teases readers with glimpses of his most private feelings. Bleak and terse, Wróblewski subjects his material to almost clinical treatment in order to better dissect and so understand the series of events that we call reality.
Reviews
"Prolonged nudity as an enhanced interrogation technique. The Juice Probe that looks for life on one of Jupiter's moons. A wish to be reincarnated as a crab. The memory of something velvety. This is the realm of melancholic hilarity that Zero Visibility occupies: at moments hallucinatory, at other moments rooted in hard reality. Found language is collaged with the imaginative workings of a brilliant mind, and the result is revelation, both funny and tragic." —Sharon Mesmer
"Zero Visibility is a smart, seductive, provocative, unsettling collection. Wróblewski continually pulls the rug out from under his reader." -Leonard Kress, Waxwing Literary Journal