Widely held to be the most influential Polish poet of a generation that includes Czeslaw Milosz and Wislawa Szymborska, Tadeusz Ro ewicz gives voice in the sharpest, most disturbing way to the crisis of values that has plagued our civilization. Joanna Trzeciak's new translation displays Ro ewicz''s supernatural simplicity, his stark diction and sudden turns.

From "regression into the primordial soup" finally I too came into the world in the year 1921 and suddenly . . . atchoo time passes I am old and forgot where I put my glasses I forgot there was history Caesar Hitler Mata Hari Stalin capitalism communism Einstein Picasso Al Capone Alka Seltzer Al Qaeda"

"Miracle Fair is Szymborska at her very best."—Harvard Book Review END

Winner of the Heldt Prize for Translation. A new translation of the Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet, with an introduction by Czeslaw Milosz. This long-awaited volume samples the full range of Wislawa Szymborska's major themes: the ironies of love, the wonders of nature's beauty, and the illusory character of art. Szymborska's voice emerges as that of a gentle subversive, self-deprecating in its wit, yet graced with a gift for coaxing the extraordinary out of the ordinary.

"What Szymborska calls 'the joy of writing' also becomes, in this book, the joy of reading."—Edward Hirsch