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To the Letter: Poems
Frank, acute, and intimate poems of human loss, resilience, and love – detective poem, historical hopscotch, love story
“A truly lyrical longing for the world to be transformed.”—Polish Book Institute
Różycki collects moments of illumination – a cat dashing out of a window and "feral sun" streaking in, a body planting itself in the ground like rhubarb and flowering. He collects and collects, opens a crack, and clutches a shrapnel of epiphany.
Tomasz Różycki's To the Letter follows Lieutenant Anielewicz on the hunt for any clues that might lead 21st century human beings out of a sense of despair. With authoritarianism rising across Eastern Europe, the Lieutenant longs for a secret hero. At first, he suspects some hidden mechanism fruit tutors him in the ways of color, he drifts out to sea to study the grammar of tides, or he gazes at the sun as it thrums away like a timepiece. In one poem, he admits "this is the story of my confusion," and in the next the Lieutenant is back on the trail. "This lunacy needs a full investigation," he jibes.
He wants to get to the bottom of it all, but he's often bewitched by letters and the trickery of language. Diacritics on Polish words form a "flock of sooty flecks, clinging to letters" and Lieutenant Anielewicz studies the tails, accents, and strokes that twist this script.
While the Lieutenant can't write a coherent code to solve life's mysteries or to fill the absence of a country rent by war, his search for patterns throughout art, philosophy, and literature lead not to despair but to an affirmation of the importance of human love
“A truly lyrical longing for the world to be transformed.”—Polish Book Institute
Różycki collects moments of illumination – a cat dashing out of a window and "feral sun" streaking in, a body planting itself in the ground like rhubarb and flowering. He collects and collects, opens a crack, and clutches a shrapnel of epiphany.
Tomasz Różycki's To the Letter follows Lieutenant Anielewicz on the hunt for any clues that might lead 21st century human beings out of a sense of despair. With authoritarianism rising across Eastern Europe, the Lieutenant longs for a secret hero. At first, he suspects some hidden mechanism fruit tutors him in the ways of color, he drifts out to sea to study the grammar of tides, or he gazes at the sun as it thrums away like a timepiece. In one poem, he admits "this is the story of my confusion," and in the next the Lieutenant is back on the trail. "This lunacy needs a full investigation," he jibes.
He wants to get to the bottom of it all, but he's often bewitched by letters and the trickery of language. Diacritics on Polish words form a "flock of sooty flecks, clinging to letters" and Lieutenant Anielewicz studies the tails, accents, and strokes that twist this script.
While the Lieutenant can't write a coherent code to solve life's mysteries or to fill the absence of a country rent by war, his search for patterns throughout art, philosophy, and literature lead not to despair but to an affirmation of the importance of human love
145 pages, Paperback
First published January 9, 2024
1 person is currently reading
127 people want to read
About the author
Tomasz Różycki
33 books18 followersTomasz Różycki (ur. 29 maja 1970 w Opolu) - polski poeta, tłumacz, romanista, mieszka w Opolu. Laureat Nagrody Kościelskich, którą otrzymał za poemat "Dwanaście stacji" (2004). Publikował w licznych czasopismach w Polsce i za granicą. Jego wiersze tłumaczone były na wiele języków europejskich. Fragment utworu "Dwanaście stacji" stał się tematem rozszerzonej matury z języka polskiego w roku 2007. Tom "Kolonie" był nominowany do Literackiej Nagrody Nike w roku 2007 i znalazł się w finałowej siódemce tej nagrody. W 2010 roku został laureatem Nagrody "Kamień", przyznawanej podczas Festiwalu "Miasto Poezji".
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
August 21, 2025
What struck me most about this collection was the rhythm and lyricism of these poems. Some of them almost felt like they could easily be rapped. Rhyming poetry doesn’t always have the best reputation, but some of these poems made sparing use of rhyme and it only heightened their effectiveness. I’m so impressed that this was translated, and I give major kudos to both the poet and the translator.
October 31, 2023
A collection of love poems, lyrical odes, a puzzle book, a murder-mystery, a post-structuralist playground, a cosmographia—this translation of Tomasz Rozycki's latest poetry book is a deep interrogation of love, of the pernicious effects of modern technology, of the power of poetry, of the grammar of the universe.
Together, the poems form a loose, fragmented narrative about a relationship that has ended (a break-up? a divorce? a death?) and a detective trying to figure out what happened. The conceit of the poems is classically lyrical. The "I" of the poems has been separated from his beloved, always addressed as "you": "Since you're not here, all this duplicity/ is left for me to foster inside of myself", he says. But while the beloved is gone, the beloved is somehow still omnipresent, a present absence that envelops the outside world: "What else can I tell you? You're there, inhabiting/ the realm outside the window—/ the endless space that grows, expands, and keeps extending." In traditional lyric elegy, the poet laments the separation from his beloved (the trope of the exclusus amator) but, in Rozycki's poetry book, the beloved's absence has perversely become its own universe, a degenerate form of Genesis: "I've set up my life/ in this void filled to the brim with your absence". The poet's world is the emptiness created by their separation: "When I lean right, you lean a little more to the left./ The world sits in between". But these are not sappy expositions on love lost; they are a detective thriller: in the background of this romantic tragedy, Lieutenant Anielewicz is trying to piece the events together: "he lays out the bodies according to the sequence of events" and he is collecting "some prints laid down, impressions, then an orange." When he finds the unfinished letters, he can finally understand and put down his autopsy tools.
But the tragedy is more than just an abortive romance; it is an indictment on modernity and its false promise of industrial optimization. In "Third Millennium", the poet rails against a bleak world of mechanized efficiency and violence: "We live in feral times/ infernal machines move through our streets/ emitting sulfur friction smoke/ fire birds fly through the air/ abducting people". Writing with a kind of pastoral naivety, the poet doesn't talk about street-cleaners or drones or iPhones but, using a mythic register, imagines them as the old premodern monsters and traps—infernal agents, fire birds, magic mirrors. Similarly, in "Lavinia", the poet recasts the wave of refugees crossing the Mediterranean to Italy as a recapitulation of the epics of Odysseus and Aeneas, arriving at the famed shores of Lampedusa and Ithaca, seeking refuge among the people of Latium. Except in this poem, the asylum-seekers sit behind barbed-wire fences and, instead of the ancient Pantheon of Jupiter, Venus and Neptune offering help, the gods and goddesses of this time "keep watch discreetly on their monitors in split display". The only difference between the mythic bronze age and the twenty-first century is that everyone now can watch disasters unfold on a personal device, distractedly toggling between crisis and entertainment. We have Olympic omniscience but are totally powerless, mere voyeurs of ubiquitous catastrophe. A hopeless sense of pessimism pervades these poems. In "Revenge Bank", the poet imagines, for the sake of argument, a utopian future: "Let's say you've won—some future revolution/ and redistribution of goods, with all the oppressed/ eagerly writing laws". But even such an egalitarian project would only be temporary: "Then someone streetside chucks a stone again". Kristallnacht is doomed to repeat itself.
The poet cannot heal or solve these crises. In fact, the poet is something of a pathetic figure. In "The First Crisis of the Reader", the poets of the world eagerly surround a reader, desperate to get his attention. The reader is drunk and tired and picks a book at random, sweating and praising his own ineptitude. He tells the poets that maybe they should give reading a go, a patronizing recommendation that does nothing to assuage their narcissistic jealousies. He ends the night complaining that the air is getting stuffy. The poets obsequiously surround him, trying to get his autograph, asking how he chooses his poems, and they humiliate themselves before an ignoramus. It's a comic inversion of the Romantic vision of the "poet genius" (in some places, Rozycki reminds me more of Charles Simic). So what is the point of this thankless poetry? In its most noble form, only a poem can bring the world together: "So many particles/ of tar are twirling in the air, and only writing/ is capable of stitching them to a story". Just as Lucretius compared the atoms of the universe to the letters of a word, both specially arranged to make a meaningful whole, Rozycki sees the intrinsic connection between language and the world. In "Ż/Ś" (a play on Roland Barthes' S/Z) and "Squiggle", the poet examines the alphabet and its diacritics and tries to understand their meaning, seeing a world of stories projected onto their simple forms. In "The Trail Goes Cold", the poet finds "the shape of an es and zee in trampled grass", an inversion of "Ż/Ś". In all his poems, he is reading the syntax and morphology of the cosmos, looking for letters and order in its turbulent chaos. Letters not only are configured into words to describe the world; they seem to take shape in the material world itself. The poet's vocation is to recognize the various letters and grammars in the world ("the subjects demanding a voice in the sentiments") and give expression to them, bringing the whirring atoms of the universe into some perceptual order.
It's a cryptic collection of poems, poignant, cerebral, a series of conceptualist, rather than confessional, odes.
Together, the poems form a loose, fragmented narrative about a relationship that has ended (a break-up? a divorce? a death?) and a detective trying to figure out what happened. The conceit of the poems is classically lyrical. The "I" of the poems has been separated from his beloved, always addressed as "you": "Since you're not here, all this duplicity/ is left for me to foster inside of myself", he says. But while the beloved is gone, the beloved is somehow still omnipresent, a present absence that envelops the outside world: "What else can I tell you? You're there, inhabiting/ the realm outside the window—/ the endless space that grows, expands, and keeps extending." In traditional lyric elegy, the poet laments the separation from his beloved (the trope of the exclusus amator) but, in Rozycki's poetry book, the beloved's absence has perversely become its own universe, a degenerate form of Genesis: "I've set up my life/ in this void filled to the brim with your absence". The poet's world is the emptiness created by their separation: "When I lean right, you lean a little more to the left./ The world sits in between". But these are not sappy expositions on love lost; they are a detective thriller: in the background of this romantic tragedy, Lieutenant Anielewicz is trying to piece the events together: "he lays out the bodies according to the sequence of events" and he is collecting "some prints laid down, impressions, then an orange." When he finds the unfinished letters, he can finally understand and put down his autopsy tools.
But the tragedy is more than just an abortive romance; it is an indictment on modernity and its false promise of industrial optimization. In "Third Millennium", the poet rails against a bleak world of mechanized efficiency and violence: "We live in feral times/ infernal machines move through our streets/ emitting sulfur friction smoke/ fire birds fly through the air/ abducting people". Writing with a kind of pastoral naivety, the poet doesn't talk about street-cleaners or drones or iPhones but, using a mythic register, imagines them as the old premodern monsters and traps—infernal agents, fire birds, magic mirrors. Similarly, in "Lavinia", the poet recasts the wave of refugees crossing the Mediterranean to Italy as a recapitulation of the epics of Odysseus and Aeneas, arriving at the famed shores of Lampedusa and Ithaca, seeking refuge among the people of Latium. Except in this poem, the asylum-seekers sit behind barbed-wire fences and, instead of the ancient Pantheon of Jupiter, Venus and Neptune offering help, the gods and goddesses of this time "keep watch discreetly on their monitors in split display". The only difference between the mythic bronze age and the twenty-first century is that everyone now can watch disasters unfold on a personal device, distractedly toggling between crisis and entertainment. We have Olympic omniscience but are totally powerless, mere voyeurs of ubiquitous catastrophe. A hopeless sense of pessimism pervades these poems. In "Revenge Bank", the poet imagines, for the sake of argument, a utopian future: "Let's say you've won—some future revolution/ and redistribution of goods, with all the oppressed/ eagerly writing laws". But even such an egalitarian project would only be temporary: "Then someone streetside chucks a stone again". Kristallnacht is doomed to repeat itself.
The poet cannot heal or solve these crises. In fact, the poet is something of a pathetic figure. In "The First Crisis of the Reader", the poets of the world eagerly surround a reader, desperate to get his attention. The reader is drunk and tired and picks a book at random, sweating and praising his own ineptitude. He tells the poets that maybe they should give reading a go, a patronizing recommendation that does nothing to assuage their narcissistic jealousies. He ends the night complaining that the air is getting stuffy. The poets obsequiously surround him, trying to get his autograph, asking how he chooses his poems, and they humiliate themselves before an ignoramus. It's a comic inversion of the Romantic vision of the "poet genius" (in some places, Rozycki reminds me more of Charles Simic). So what is the point of this thankless poetry? In its most noble form, only a poem can bring the world together: "So many particles/ of tar are twirling in the air, and only writing/ is capable of stitching them to a story". Just as Lucretius compared the atoms of the universe to the letters of a word, both specially arranged to make a meaningful whole, Rozycki sees the intrinsic connection between language and the world. In "Ż/Ś" (a play on Roland Barthes' S/Z) and "Squiggle", the poet examines the alphabet and its diacritics and tries to understand their meaning, seeing a world of stories projected onto their simple forms. In "The Trail Goes Cold", the poet finds "the shape of an es and zee in trampled grass", an inversion of "Ż/Ś". In all his poems, he is reading the syntax and morphology of the cosmos, looking for letters and order in its turbulent chaos. Letters not only are configured into words to describe the world; they seem to take shape in the material world itself. The poet's vocation is to recognize the various letters and grammars in the world ("the subjects demanding a voice in the sentiments") and give expression to them, bringing the whirring atoms of the universe into some perceptual order.
It's a cryptic collection of poems, poignant, cerebral, a series of conceptualist, rather than confessional, odes.
June 20, 2024
I struggled to get into this collection, which was a bit disappointing. Rozycki's reputation gave this collection some hype. It's possible translating him is just impossible. As noted in the afterword (which should have been a forward) a lot of wordplay was lost in translation, and the feeling Rozycki built in his native language just didn't come across in English. Though I guess I could never really know, based on her commentary in the book, I do have a lot of confidence in Mira Rosenthal's handling of the material but certain phrasings left me adrift. For example: "A sudden shock of rain in Bologna that pours/quite literally just like a storm on the frigid sea/way up North. Scarcely a drop and it instantly/ devastates the plan on the face of a tourist," There may be some tricky Polish grammar at work behind the scenes there but in English I couldn't escape the inelegance. I wish any reader better luck than me with this one.
August 14, 2024
I am so obsessed with Różycki’s repeated use of ones and zeros as a binary of life and death, of the space between them as representing grief and the emptiness left behind after… His interrogation of empty space and the void and heartbreak are sooo fascinating to me. Also space and planetary bodies as a metaphor for human connection and the vast emotional distance between us as humans that we nevertheless traverse… ugh!!! So good!!! I also just thought the prioritization of rhythm and rhyme in the translation was very fun and masterful
January 7, 2024
A collection of poetry in three parts: Vacuum Theory, The Third Planet, and Summer of Music, all comprised of quatrains in pentameters made of iambs and anapests, sometimes with end- or inner-rhymes, usually of only four quatrains. Contrariness and dualities bring tension to the various topics. Poems about love (lost and present), Polish history, and nature, with allusions to Robert Frost, Seamus Heaney, and Roland Barthes. I find it difficult to talk about these poems apart from describing their technical attributes and topics. Good use of images; clichés avoided; but the insights don’t transcend the topics and techniques. Mira Rosenthal, who translates Różycki’s poems, clarifies in her afterword why don’t feel a sense of Różycki’s poems rising above their techniques and topics: “tension comes not from the personal but from the philosophical investigation of the dialectic of presence and absence in which we’re all inscribed.”
October 30, 2023
In Tomasz Rozycki's "To the Letter," he explores what happens when countries go mad, and you have to make sense of the grief and destruction. The book is extremely relevant today where we have so much violence, hatred, war, and terror. Tomasz Rozycki's poems grapple with how we carve out our existence through changes in geography, language, and body. I found the poems beautiful and moving, but there were too many shifts in tone and themes so that I often felt confused. There is a lot of wordplay here that may get lost in translation from the original Polish, as the translator's notes indicate in the afterword. The afterword should have been put before the poems so that readers new to Tomasz Rozycki's poems would have understood the poems better.. It's still a worthwhile book, and I'll remember the feeling of grief throughout the work.
December 26, 2023
I enjoy poetry books as something I can read a little bit at a time. Rozycki's poetry makes me want to keep picking it up. I will keep reading to learn more about how he writes and the way puts words together. Well worth reading. If you're not a poetry lover, you might become one.
November 11, 2023
Thank you Archipelago Books and NetGalley for early access to this collection. Check it out January 2024.
What a interesting conceptual collection about the rise of totalitarian violence in the 21st century. Różycki subverts this rise in violence and overindustrialization with descriptions of nature and life in the Polish countryside. I wish the collection was shorter or a bit more sparse, as there are tons of poems (over 100) and ideas here. Though, I did particularly enjoy the interrogation of diacritics in the Polish language. Also, because most of these poems are prose and loose, I would be curious to read something more long form from this author. I love Polish writing and am very happy to have read this, even if I didn't enjoy all of the pieces here.
What a interesting conceptual collection about the rise of totalitarian violence in the 21st century. Różycki subverts this rise in violence and overindustrialization with descriptions of nature and life in the Polish countryside. I wish the collection was shorter or a bit more sparse, as there are tons of poems (over 100) and ideas here. Though, I did particularly enjoy the interrogation of diacritics in the Polish language. Also, because most of these poems are prose and loose, I would be curious to read something more long form from this author. I love Polish writing and am very happy to have read this, even if I didn't enjoy all of the pieces here.
October 25, 2023
I believe that there's always something for everyone in literature, and one book may be my favorite and least favorite for another- it's possible, and with that, reading this felt like a collection of observations devoid of emotions, maybe there is the essence of beauty in the blurb that exists in Polish, but not in English.
I know it will find the right readers and they'll marvel at the eloquence of it all.
Thank you Netgalley for the eARC.
I know it will find the right readers and they'll marvel at the eloquence of it all.
Thank you Netgalley for the eARC.
November 6, 2023
First of all, thank you netgalley for this poetry collection. Sometimes I wish I understood writings in their own languages. Maybe it's the translation but there were only a few poems I've enjoyed. Maybe I will read it again in awhile and change my mind but for now, thanks for giving me this to review
December 18, 2023
Not my kind of modern poetry, but for someone liking this material, this seems an excellent way of looking at it, with a fine introductory postscript and a very readable translation.
Want to read
March 30, 2025In this philosophical collection that explores doubt—regarding language, God, and the prospect of repeating history—many poems address an unreachable “you” who could be a lover, a deity, or a ghost of someone long dead. Rosenthal’s translation draws out these poems’ shades of melancholy and whimsy, along with the slant and irregular rhymes that contribute to their uncanny humor. Różycki’s verse teems with sensuous, imaginatively rendered details: “that half-drunk cup of tea, the mirror / filled up with want, the strand of hair curling toward / the drain like the Silk Road through the Karakum / known as Tartary, the wall that defends the void.”
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews