A seven-month-pregnant friend told me recently that the day of one’s birth is statistically the most dangerous day of one’s life; for women, the second most dangerous day in their adult life is the one on which they give birth. It is on this border of life and death that poet Justyna Bargielska
Her eyes wide with terror, Omega stares at the figures trudging towards her. They’re zombies, just like the ones in the movies she’s not allowed to watch. The living dead. “JesusChristandGodAlmighty!” thinks Omega, as every hair on her head stands on end. But she doesn’t budge. Her legs re
Eleven-year-old Joanna lives with her self-absorbed mother in a smart flat. Escaping into computer games, she creates an interesting internal life, as Omega. On her 12th birthday she receives a mysterious email inviting her to download “the greatest game in the world”. But it’s a game with a d
Julia Fiedorczuk, ELNet’s recent guest at one of our Euro Stars events, is known principally as a poet and a critic who popularised the idea of ecopoetry. She has published five collections of poems in her native Poland (Oxygen, translated into English by Bill Johnston, is about to be published in
Agnieszka Dale’s psychological territory is bridge-building. She straddles the land of her birth – Poland – and her adoptive UK home. National shape-shifting and the individual’s pliability in reconciling the personal and the communal are the underpinnings of her work; she takes to them with
Jacek Dehnel’s first full collection in English spans the past 15 years and includes work from four of his Polish collections. His translator, Karen Kovacik, has chosen to order the collection according to theme or feeling rather than chronology, so the English-language reader is better able to ex
