Exquisitely-crafted poems from Poland that explore how stories, and history, lie beneath the surface: of a neighbor’s face, city streets, ancient ruins, even language. Krystyna Dąbrowska is an award-winning younger Polish poet whose poems convey a profound curiosity about the world, not only expressed by the lyric speaker but by those inside the poems ― two owls guarding their nest, or a dog at the beach, or blind visitors in a museum. Her work and use of language so captivated the three translators that they decided to collaborate on this collection together. Many poems address daily life; others delve into the Holocaust, family relationships, and travels ― to Cairo, Georgia, Jerusalem. Tideline is her first book in English, presented bilingually with the original Polish.
Krystyna Dąbrowska is the author of four books of poetry, as well as essays and translations, and the winner of two of Poland’s most prestigious literary prizes, the Wisława Szymborska Award and the Kościelski Award. English translations of her work have been published in numerous U.S. literary journals, including Harper’s, The Harvard Review, The Brooklyn Rail, The Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere, and she has been translated into sixteen other languages. She lives and works in Warsaw, Poland.
Co-translator Antonia Lloyd-Jones is the translator of the 2018 Nobel Prize laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, which was a finalist for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize. She translates several of Poland’s leading contemporary novelists and reportage authors, as well as crime fiction, poetry and children’s books, and her translations of poetry have appeared in the New Yorker, Harpers, Modern Poetry in Translation, and elsewhere. Zephyr Press published her translations of Black Square and Posts, both by Tadeusz Dąbrowski. She lives in London, U.K.
Co-translator Karen Kovacik’s translation of Aperture, by Jacek Dehnel (Zephyr Press, 2018), was a finalist for the 2019 PEN Poetry in Translation Award. She edited Scattering the Dark, an anthology of Polish women poets (White Pine, 2016), and her translations have appeared widely, including in the Boston Review, Colorado Review, Mid-American Review, Trafika Europe, Two Lines, and World Literature Today. She was Indiana’s Poet Laureate from 2012 to 2014, and is the author of the collections Metropolis Burning and Beyond the Velvet Curtain. She lives in Indianapolis, Indiana.
Co-translator Mira Rosenthal is poet, translator, and past fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and Stanford University’s Stegner Fellowship. Her translation of Polish poet Tomasz Różycki’s collection, Colonies (Zephyr Press, 2013), was shortlisted for the 2014 Griffin International Poetry Prize and won the 2015 Northern California Book Award. Her work appears regularly in such journals as Poetry, Ploughshares, Threepenny Review, Yale Review, and elsewhere. Her first book of poems, The Local World, received the Wick Poetry Prize. She lives in Los Osos, California.
