Aperture
The poet brings his fascination with formal poetry to 21st century subjects — internet culture, science, postmodern architecture — even as he also explores intimacy, gay love, and emotionally-charged objects in this bilingual (Polish/English) collection. Dehnel's range of style and diction includes poems based on the classic Polish thirteen-syllable line and intricate rhyming stanzas, to prose poems and freer lyrics. "My restlessness… is one of my strongest traits—that insatiability for places, books, paintings, people," he says.
Jacek Dehnel is a poet, writer, translator and painter who was born in Gdansk, Poland in 1980. The winner of the 2005 Koscielski Foundation Award and the 2006 Polityka Passport Award, he has written seven volumes of poetry and a dozen books of novels and short stories. His first volume of poetry received an enthusiastic endorsement by Czeslaw Milosz. Dehnel is also a painter, and the translator of works by Philip Larkin, W. H. Auden, George Szirtes, Osip Mandelstam and others into Polish.
