Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. The story of swimming has no beginning or end. Ever since humans glimpsed the open sea, or a pond, or a river, they have strived to reach the other shore. A swimming pool puts that goal within our reach, if only metaphorically. In the swimming pool - outdoor, indoor - we can both forget who we are and dream of becoming someone else, which is why we swim for pleasure, exercise, and relaxation. Swimming Pool looks at the pool as a place where humans seek to attain the unique union between mind and body. As a former world-ranked swimmer whose journey toward naturalization and U.S. citizenship began with a swimming fellowship, Piotr Florczyk reflects on his own adventures in swimming pools while taking a closer look at artists, architects, writers, and others who have helped to cement the swimming pool’s prominent and iconic role in our society and culture. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Building the Barricade, harrowing and demanding, here takes its place in English among the twentieth century's master works of war-witness."--Jane HirshfieldBuilding the Barricade, is poetry of witness, and a lyric account of the sixty-three day Warsaw uprising.Caught between German occupation and the advancing Soviets, the Polish Resistance Home Army barricaded central Warsaw in hopes of liberating the city and gaining Polish sovereignty. Building the Barricade is Anna Świrszczyńska's first-person account of the atrocities that destroyed over 60% of the Polish capital and left over 100,000 civilians and 16,000 Polish resistance fighters dead.Świrszczyńska had joined the resistance as a military nurse and later wrote: "Day and night German bombers raged over the capital, burying the living beneath the rubble."

This carefully curated collection consists of 16 chapters by leading Polish and world literature scholars from the United States, Canada, Italy, and, of course, Poland. An historical approach gives readers a panoramic view of Polish authors and their explicit or implicit contributions to world literature. Indeed, the volume shows how Polish authors, from Jan Kochanowski in the 16th century to the 2018 Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk, have engaged with their foreign counterparts and other traditions, active participants in the global literary network and the conversations of their day. The volume features views of Polish literature and culture within theories of world literature and literary systems, with a particular attention paid to the resurgence of the idea of the physical book as a cultural artifact. This perspective is especially important since so much of today's global literary output stems from Anglophone perceptions of what constitutes literary quality and tastes. The collection also sheds light on specific issues pertaining to Poland, such as the idea of Polishness, and global phenomena, including social and economic advancement as well as ecological degradation. Some of the authors discussed, like the Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz or the 1980 Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz, were renowned far beyond the borders of their country, while others, like the contemporary travel writer and novelist Andrzej Stasiuk, embrace regionalism, seeing as they do in their immediate surroundings a synecdoche of the world at large. Nevertheless, the picture of Polish literature and Polish authors that emerges from these articles is that of a diverse, cosmopolitan cohort engaged in a mutually rewarding relationship with what the late French critic Pascale Casanova has called "the world republic of letters."

"Invisible is a teasing title for a collection of poetry. [Wallace] Stevens, with whose work Jacek Gutorow has a deep and sustained engagement, suggested in 'The Creations of Sound', that poems should 'make the visible a little hard / To see' [...] Both Gutorow and Stevens develop a poetic medium that maintains an oscillating dialectic between the seen and the unseen. The invisible operates not as an occlusion of reality, but as an aura saturating what is described; images are gently prised from the contexts of time and place and invested with a mysterious in-between life ..." - Mark Ford, from the Introduction to Invisible

This sequence of poems (taken from Florczyk's full-length collection From the Annals of Krakow, published in the USA in 2106) is based on the testimonies of Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust. Florczyk, who was born and raised in Krakow, wanted to retell their story of persecution and perseverance and luck so that, with the passing of time, it wouldn't be forgotten; he wanted to keep their memory alive. These sensitive, closely observed and deeply moving poems do just that.

""His poems are meditative and beautiful, his diction fragile and clear...In short, it is a lovely book, and BOA Editions has provided us with a fine candidate for torchbearer."--Hey Small Press "

"We are fortunate to now have them in English so that we who don't read Polish can now read these, and enjoy their insight and wry wit."--Mary Jo Bang
" Gutorow] has clearly mastered the ability to make metaphor seem distinct."--Kaitlin Dyer, "The West Coast Translation Review"

In his triumphant collection "The Folding Star and Other Poems," poet of the imagination Jacek Gutorow offers thirty-one gems that that will help change our understanding of Polish poetry.

Jacek Gutorow has been nominated for the Nike Award, the Cogito Award, and the Gdynia Award. He teaches at the University of Opole.

Piotr Florczyk has taught at the University of Delaware, Antioch University Los Angeles, and University of California-Riverside. He lives in Los Angeles, California.

Dariusz Sosnicki's poems open our eyes to the sublime just beneath the surface of the mundane: a train carrying children away from their parents for summer vacation turns into a ravenous monster; a meal at a Chinese restaurant inspires a surreal journey through the zodiac; a malfunctioning printer is a reminder of the ghosts that haunt us no matter where we find ourselves."

Among the perpetrators and victims,
buzzed or wasted to the bone,
gliding without their blinkers on
in the ruts of the national fate--they're not at home."

Dariusz Sosnicki is an award-winning poet, essayist, and editor in Poland.

Poetry. Bilingual Edition. Translated from the Polish by Piotr Florczyk. "At the start of this book you will find one of my favorite poems from contemporary Poland, 'My Wife's Spine.' 'And when my wife's pregnant / her spine is a bough of an apple tree, ' Jarosław Mikołajewski begins, innocently enough, and then: 'On nights of animal love / it is the zipper in a suitcase / that won't close, even under a knee' and wow, we say, just about to take a surprised breath, when a poet surprises us again: 'On nights of human love / it is the steel rope / at the highest voltage, ' and he goes on, with each metaphor more unpredictable than the previous: 'On the noon walk / my wife's spine is the flag / carried by the pilgrims' guide in a crowded church.' This is contemporary European poetry at its best, I think: tender, unpredictable, a hymn, a love poem, a moment of laughter, of revelation. And, there are many moments like that in this collection, where 'the earth howls loudly / because I've gone upstairs'--reading such lines one thinks of the lineage of Vasko Popa and Miroslav Holub, but there is a new music, too, set 'to the words that have aged / since the last trip / "aeroporto" and "areoporto"'--and there is new wisdom, too: 'how the words age in me, ' says the poet. Indeed. 'They are like soft gums / losing teeth.' This is beautiful poetry. One's gratitude is to Piotr Florczyk for bringing this new voice, previously unknown to Americans, and making this poet available in lines that captivate. Polish poets are much beloved in America today, but introducing a new voice is never an easy task. And Florczyk has done this many times over. This generosity of spirit is astounding."--Ilya Kaminsky"Who's Jarosław Mikołajewski? Is he an angry poet? No, not really. Is he pater familias? Yes, he is, but this doesn't tell us much about his poetry. Reading his poems we follow his itinerary, we go with him to Rome--he's at home in the Italian culture though his first home is in Warsaw, we see his wife, his daughters, we remember his father. Mikołajewski's poetry is alive. This is a huge praise, maybe the highest one: it's not an academic enterprise. His poems are kicking, running, appealing to us, readers. His poems live."--Adam Zagajewski

Poetry. Translated from the Polish by Piotr Florczyk. Born in Gliwice in 1946, Julian Kornhauser is one of the most acclaimed figures of Polish poetry writing today. A major figure of the New Wave movement of the 1970s, he has published eight books since the mid-1990s. This debut collection of his work in English, which draws exclusively on three recent volumes and presents the poems in a new arrangement, touches upon most, if not all, of Kornhauser's major subject matters, formal strategies, and thematic concerns, giving American readers the opportunity to discover one of Poland's most important contemporary writers in Piotr Florczyk's splendid translations.