Tadeusz Dąbrowski. The Scent of Man. Bilingual poetry reading and book talk. Monday, November 3, 7 pm. Chanin Language Center (Insdorf Screening Room, B126 Hunter West Building). Free and open to the public.
RSVP: https://www.reechunter.com/current-events.html#Dabrowski
Tadeusz Dąbrowski’s poetry is as beguiling, reflective and precise as a thousand fragments of a shattered mirror. The poet is properly suspicious of the ambiguities concealed in all language: “very dangerous to know/too many words.//Each of them has its/flip side, which/also has its flip side/and so on ad infinitum.” Whether gazing at art or looking at laundry, meditating on our cravings for bread or literature, the poems move effortlessly between the mundane and the exalted, suggesting that the messiness of human experience, its visceral realities, the carnal truths of the body, our small joys and inevitable decay, are all part of the same fragile narrative. The Scent of Man, masterfully translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, moves intimately through spaces sacred and profane, suggesting we are never fully in one world or the other but ever adrift in between.
Tadeusz Dąbrowski (b. 1979) is a poet, essayist, critic. Editor-in-chief of the literary bimonthly Topos. He has been published in The New Yorker, Paris Review, Boston Review, Threepenny Review, Ploughshares, Agni, American Poetry Review, Poetry Daily, Guernica, among others. Recipient of stipends awarded by Yaddo (2015), the Omi International Arts Center (NY, 2013), and the Vermont Studio Center (2011). Winner of numerous awards, among others, the Kościelski Prize (2009), the Hubert Burda Prize (2008) and, from Tadeusz Różewicz, the Prize of the Foundation for Polish Culture (2006). He has been nominated for the NIKE Award (2010). His work has been translated into 30 languages. Author of ten volumes of poetry in his native Polish, from which the most recent are Scrabble (2020) and To jest fajka (2022) [This is a pipe], and a dozen in translation. He has also published a novel, Bezbronna kreska (2016) [Defenseless line], set in New York City, and a collection of essays on poetry, entitled In Metaphor (2024). Two of his collections, Black Square and POSTS have been published in English by Zephyr Press. He lives in Gdańsk on the Baltic coast of Poland.
PRAISE
Tadeusz Dąbrowski is in poetry what the French call le grand reporter. He has the temperament of a realist but his realism is of a poetic nature, it leads to a revelation, not to accusation. His poems achieve an astonishing degree of density which is an adequate response to the absurdity of our world. A remarkable collection of poems! (Adam Zagajewski)
Location: Hunter College CUNY (Lexington Avenue & East 68th Street, 6 train). Chanin Language Center (room B126 Hunter West Building).
Directions: Please sign in as a guest at the lobby of the Hunter West Building. This event is on floor B1, room B126 (Insdorf Screening Room). From the entrance, please take one floor down on the escalator.