Born in Gliwice in 1946, Julian Kornhauser is one of the most acclaimed figures of Polish poetry writing today, while also being a critic, translator, and professor of South Slavic Literatures at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. A major figure of the New Wave movement of the 1970s, he has published eight books since the mid-1990s, including three collections of poetry, Kamyk i cien (Stone and Shadow, 1996), Bylo minelo (Been and Gone, 2001), and Origami (2007), in which a shift from collective preoccupations to a more personal and iconographic tone can be seen. Accordingly, this debut collection of his work in English, which draws exclusively on those three recent volumes and presents the poems in a new arrangement, should not be viewed as aiming to account for the poet's voluminous and diverse body of work. The selection does, however, touch upon most, if not all, of Kornhauser's major subject matters, formal strategies, and thematic concerns, giving American readers the opportunity, via Piotr Florczyk's splendid translation, to discover one of Poland's most important contemporary writers.

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