Strata

by Ewa Chrusciel

Strata is a series of interconnected lyric prose poems that fluctuate between order and chaos like flocks of swallows rearranging themselves in flight. The rhythmic oscillation of the poems builds into a postmodern story that weaves through the life of a poet who’s migrated from Poland to the U.S. The world is magnificently large from any vantage point and Chrusciel helps us locate something larger than ourselves by constantly holding both the particular of her life and the universe at each moment. With the title, Strata , meaning "loss" in Polish and "accretion" in English, Chrusciel braids, juxtaposes, and synthesizes through repetition, despite a wide range of subjects. Her alchemy includes exquisite details about parents and ancestry, the paradoxes of belonging to two languages, the miracles of existence, the joy and angst of love and belonging, the sorrow and dislocation of Eastern block politics, and a chorus of spiritual incantation and transient revelation.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published March 10, 2011

Reviews

[Joe Decamillis · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful rare experience in contemporary poetry. It lured me into the first reading with images exotic, charged, worldly, local, mundane, personal, relevant, dated, historic, natural, prosthetic, deep, shallow, and so on while always retaining a flow that kept me reading onto the next line even when deep concepts or more complex structural arrangements temporarily clouded meaning. Some come off as autobiographical flash fiction disguised as poetic versions of Eastern European short stories, some as cryptic notes to a lover or an ex, at least a couple could be songs by an American indie band whose singer ditched literary scholarship to hit the road. I usually detest verbose pretentious descriptions like these, but I can' seem to avoid them in describing Ewa Chrusciel's potent book of poems. Their lyric beauty leave me warmly anticipating future readings where awkward moments can unlock themselves to my comprehension. This is one that I will keep on my studio shelf and go back to time and time again like Dickinson, Hughes, Heaney, Hopkins, Sexton, Chekov, Williams, and Whitman.

[Tucker · Rating 5 out of 5]

New Hampshire's greatest living poet!