Author Description

Perhaps the most interesting political poetry to emerge out of the last generation of Polish poets to come of age during Communism is the work of Bronislaw Maj-not because it explicitly references the historical trauma of 1980s Poland during and after the period of Martial Law, but because Maj's poetry addresses the integrity of the poetic gaze itself. In these poems, Maj both celebrates his beloved city of Kraków as well as mourns its ongoing physical and spiritual deterioration, all the while grappling with the vulnerability of past and present lives-and how we are always at the mercy of whatever future might be "reading" our fragile stories. Fittingly, decades later, the lyrical and philosophical power of these poems stirringly remain. These poems are now gathered together in Extinction of the Holy City to share with American readers the elegiac but also redemptive harvest of this writer. What People Are Saying "At long last, we have Bronislaw Maj's words to cherish in English, to read quietly and aloud. Maj's poems shine in Daniel Bourne's exquisite translation." -Piotr Florczyk, Winner of the 2017 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award "Bronislaw Maj's Extinction of the Holy City, in Daniel Bourne's adept translation, offers the luminous moments that make up a life. By turns ecstatic, conflicted, or mournful, Maj's first-person speaker tunes into the self, his adopted city of Kraków, or the seasons again and again. It's a secular meditation, an agnostic book of hours-the perfect antidote to our world of distraction." -Karen Kovacik, poet and translator, including Agnieszka Kuciak's Distant Lands: An Anthology of Poets Who Don't Exist "I'm in awe of Maj's superb observations, and I'm grateful to Daniel Bourne for capturing them in English. These two poets remind us that 'we live in the frailest of eons, ' but that our earth is 'surrounded by the warm cloud of human breath.'" -Derek Mong, author of The