Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Artists and Writers: Updates

Sharon Chmielarz's new book of poems, The Sky is Great, The Sky is Blue, is now available from Whistling Shade Press. Here's a poem from this book:

Chopin: Apples

And what country hasn’t he lived in,
his music chilling the listener’s arms?

And when haven’t his glissandos
spilled over history, the colossus

that upsets lives like apple carts?
Apples rolling over cobbles.

God-fall we think,
finding among the bruised,

a handful of sweet apples.
The easy thank you is listening

to someone playing at a window
in Warsaw, turning the rumble

of despair into a mazurka.
“Beloved little corpse,” Sand called Chopin,

sitting beside him at the keyboard.
Her “angel.” His music, his wings.

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Douglas Jacobson's second novel The Katyn Order is now available. The novel deals with the Polish Underground's attempt to locate the Soviet order to kill the 20,000 Polish officers at Katyn.

Here's what Publishers Weekly says about the book: “Jacobson follows his debut, Night of Flames, with another solid WWII thriller. The author makes the bloody fight for Warsaw both exciting and suspenseful.”

You can read my recent blog about Night of Flame by just clicking here.

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Actor/Director/Writer Marek Probosz has recently had his volume of short stories Call Me When They Kill You published in Poland. Also, Director Probosz's recent film Y.M.I., a psychological thriller about teen suicide, is now available from Amazon.

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The latest issue of Poets on Adoption features the work of three Polish American poets: Christina Pacosz, Sharon Mesmer, and Mary Krane Derr. http://poetsonadoption.blogspot.com/

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Peter and Laura Zeranski have just published a new cookbook of traditional Polish recipes. Find out more about the book at their blog.

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Elisabeth Murawski is featured at the Serving House Books website. The page includes a video of Ms. Murawski reading a poem and a link to an interview.

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The book This Way: Covering/Uncovering Tadeusz Borowski’s This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, edited by John Bertram and Marco Sonzogni, was just published. The book focuses on the recently completed competition to design a cover for Tadeusz Borowski's book on Auschwitz, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentleman. A website devoted to this project and to Borowski's book is online.

I especially recommend the sample pages from the book. They offer some of the recent covers from the competition along with brief essays about the history of Borowski's great work.

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Grzegorz Wróblewski has recently published one of his paintings, entitled "These Extraordinary People," at The Post-Literate (R)Evolution. website.

Three of his new poems, original Polish versions and English translations (by Agnieszka Pokojska), appear in the current issue of the political journal CounterPunch.

His art will be featured in an exhibit focusing on the word as image until July 2 at the Bury Art Museum, Bury, England.

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Mark Pawlak placed a poem, part of his Lubec, Maine, journal, at Wilderness House Literary Review. It appears in the poetry section.

The new issue of Hanging Loose #98, co-edited by Mark Pawlak, features a number of Polish American writers: Karina Borowicz, Stephen Lewandowski, Sharon Mesmer, Elisabeth Murawksi, and Mark himself.

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Martin Stepek is currently building a personal website which includes, among other things, a number of his fine poems about what happened to Poland during World War II. The site is available at www.martinstepek.com.

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Sharon Mesmer's essay on Flarf poetry along with several of her poems appear in the latest issue of the online journal Scream Online. If you haven't read her flarf-ish poems, take a look. They are wild. Here's a piece of one of them:

I Am Now Bringing Everything To The Path

Working class, ethnic, hard-hearted and obscure,
I am the Polish church in anguish.
And that’s why I am now bringing everything to The Path.
Granted, Yale’s musical recruitment you tube video
is ludicrous, but no matter where you are, chances are
you can crack a window and hear a cow moo,
a cow who is bringing everything to The Path, too. . . .

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Mira Rosenthal's translations of Tomasz Rozycki's book Colonies has just been accepted by Zephyr Press. She read some of the poems from this book at a reading with Adam Zagajewski this spring in New York.

Ms. Rosenthal's poems are also something wonderful. Here she is reading two of them at the Cortland Review site.

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Piotr Florczyk's translation of Anna Swir's Building the Barricade and Other Poems of Anna Swir is now available at Amazon. I recentyly posted a blog about the book with several poems from the collection. Click here.

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My poem "What My Father Believed" was re-posted at Tikkun's Network for Spiritual Progressives.

The short personal essay I wrote about the wooden trunk that my parents brought to America from the Displaced Persons Camps in Germany after World War II was the featured essay this last March at Sandra Hurtes' website.

My poems "War Poets" and "My Father Talks about Time and the Camps" appear in the latest issue of the print journal Two Review. You can purchase a copy of the journal by clicking here. (The current issue also contains two fine poems by Oriana Ivy.)

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The photo of the Tatra Mountains of Poland is by a photographer who goes by the name Lonelywolf2.

3 comments:

oriana said...

The Chopin poem is stunning, simply stunning. Please convey my admiration to Sharon Chmielarz. Oriana

Anonymous said...

Loved the Chopin poem for its elegant simplicity. It entices me to own the entire collection.

Lois

Anonymous said...

Thank you for sharing this gorgeous Chopin poem. I am now tempted to purchase the entire collection.

Lois