To the Letter

Praise

“In this philosophical collection that explores doubt—regarding language, God, and the prospect of repeating history—many poems address an unreachable “you” who could be a lover, a deity, or a ghost of someone long dead. Rosenthal’s translation draws out these poems’ shades of melancholy and whimsy, along with the slant and irregular rhymes that contribute to their uncanny humor. Różycki’s verse teems with sensuous, imaginatively rendered details.” — The New Yorker

“Across the ninety-nine poems of Polish poet Tomasz Różycki’s To The Letter, presides a calling out to absence, often in the form of this “you” whether in loss—cultural, global, personal—or self-examination . . . This collection has, perhaps, added resonance landing in 2023: “You—out there where the future pushes through like a worm from an apple, only the hole is in heaven and so enormous we’ll all fall in, along with tenements, convenience stores, our entire state—let’s say it’s nowhere—” A notable contribution to Polish poetry available in English–and a vital living voice, no less.” — Rebecca Morgan Frank, LitHub

“We live in feral times,” the poet says, asking us “what shape this era will carve / in flesh.” In Mira Rosenthal’s exacting, beautiful translations, Tomasz Różycki’s work gives us a moment of honest assessment, answering hard questions without patronizing, with lyric precision. One of Poland’s best living poets, he is writing at the height of his powers. Which, for me, means: there is mystery in his work, that feels trustworthy—“we will dig ourselves out of our private muck /of subtext, shed the weight,” he says, “and fly off, empty, for the nearest lightbulb.” It is amongst the quotidian that he seeks to be saved, his is a vision in which despite all the tragedy of this new century, the thrush that sings “at two a.m. outside /our window in the parking lot has saved / the day, the month.” If that is to be our new metaphysics, count me in. — Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa

“The poems are intimate and wry, philosophically complex, and charged with metaphors for absence and language itself.” — Dana Isokawa, Poets & Writers Magazine

“Irony is the spice of poetry . . . Różycki’s irony can be caustic (“some people are so poor the only thing they have/is money, money”), or it can be sublimely political . . . Rosenthal deserves special praise for rendering Różycki’s wordplay, musical density, and metonymic dazzle into powerful English . . . Różycki’s poem as “rolled-up paper/gun” is a handmade, fragile, but potent technology for survival.” — Ange Mlinko, The New York Review of Books

“The past will never leave us. It will haunt our photographs; it will speak between the words that we read and write. Różycki’s collection, brought to us through Rosenthal’s beautiful translation, helps us remember that it is art that will lead us through to a bearable future, and art that will always speak the unspeakable.” — Iris Dunkle, Words Without Borders

“Mysterious events in Agualusa’s stories reveal a kinship with García Márquez, whereas events of mysterious ambiguity fall into Bolaño’s camp . . . Daniel Hahn’s translation successfully conveys that straight-faced equanimity needed for staring absurdities in the eyes.” — Tom Bowden, The Book Beat

“[Mira Rosenthal’s] English iterations fully relay the poems’ accessibility, music, and humor—as well as the ways they integrate into surprising valences with creativity, love, and interbeing . . .To the Letter reminds us that fragmentation offers an opportunity to listen and create, that the blank spaces between words are places in which new life may yet be lived. It reminds us that the reader is doubly alive, watching and being watched, even from the shadows.” — Michael Collins, Asymptote Journal

“For Różycki, the void is . . . about loss—whether of the place he was forced to flee, or of the life he missed out on as a consequence . . . Where poetry usually stops at anguish, Różycki goes the whole length to realize the fullness of a proxy conjured by loss, the stranger who lives on in the mind.” — Janani Ambikapathy, Harriet Books (the blog of the Poetry Foundation)