To the Letter: Poems

Frank, acute, and intimate poems of human loss, resilience, and love – detective poem, historical hopscotch, love story

“A truly lyrical longing for the world to be transformed.”—Polish Book Institute

Różycki collects moments of illumination – a cat dashing out of a window and "feral sun" streaking in, a body planting itself in the ground like rhubarb and flowering. He collects and collects, opens a crack, and clutches a shrapnel of epiphany.

Tomasz Różycki's To the Letter follows Lieutenant Anielewicz on the hunt for any clues that might lead 21st century human beings out of a sense of despair. With authoritarianism rising across Eastern Europe, the Lieutenant longs for a secret hero. At first, he suspects some hidden mechanism afoot: fruit tutors him in the ways of color, he drifts out to sea to study the grammar of tides, or he gazes at the sun as it thrums away like a timepiece. In one poem, he admits "this is the story of my confusion," and in the next the Lieutenant is back on the trail. "This lunacy needs a full investigation," he jibes.

He wants to get to the bottom of it all, but he's often bewitched by letters and the trickery of language. Diacritics on Polish words form a "flock of sooty flecks, clinging to letters" and Lieutenant Anielewicz studies the tails, accents, and strokes that twist this script.

While the Lieutenant can't write a coherent code to solve life's mysteries or to fill the absence of a country rent by war, his search for patterns throughout art, philosophy, and literature lead not to despair but to an affirmation of the importance of human love