Stranger, from estranged: added to, from without. Like Robert Frank s photographs in The Americans, Piotr Gwiazda s poems manage to arrest the wholly contemporary moment with a clarity that sees through to the underlying structure the intention, the idea latent underneath. They pose for photographs, / rehearsing nonexistence. Their maps are inaccurate and their money is worthless. Gasoline flows through their systems. Funny and furious, wry and engaged, Gwiazda is a poet of astonishing intelligence and accomplishment, wholly in the American grain while at the same time international or cosmopolitan in his influences and interests. These poems provide us with a kind of magic, self-estranging looking-glass, enabling us to see ourselves from a great distance. How small we look, how odd. Reading this book I begin to understand how the future (if there is one) might regard us with pity, amusement (we are, after all, family) and a deep, deep frustration. Aspects of Strangers is the antidote to that frustration, which makes it that rarest of things, a necessary book of poetry. The dislocations that locate you, the clues one builds from the generic similarity of places, how behind them a universal mystery rises these are the starting points of Piotr Gwiazda s excellent Aspects of Strangers. It s an important thing that Gwiazda reminds us of, this call to attend, to be aware of ourselves, even as we become a they, where language also becomes a kind of camouflage. Gwiazda s is an important and different take on the contemporary situation, and for that a necessary voice to consider, and do as you re asked: Please call back if this is a wrong number.
Piotr Gwiazda gives us the postmodern flâneur in Aspects of Strangers, somewhere between Station of the Metro and Sans Soleil, between dystopia and the abyss. The language of the pedestrian in the necropolis is sharp and ironic, but his peers are deracinated, clueless, and reasonably content, in a Deleuzianly vertiginous way. Gwiazda s dazzling carnival of maxims, observations, inverted slogans, pieces of dreams, quotations, asides . . . is like a miniature twenty-first century Arcades Project, and in the throes of his caustic ars poetica perhaps there is a glimmer of hope for awakening from the bad dream we ve induced.
About the Author
Piotr Gwiazda is the author of two previous books of poems, Gagarin Street (2005) and Messages (2012). He has also published two critical studies, James Merrill and W.H. Auden (2007) and US Poetry in the Age of Empire, 1979-2012 (2014). His translation of Grzegorz Wróblewski s Kopenhaga appeared in 2013. He teaches at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC).
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