Sobbing Superpower: Selected Poems of Tadeusz Rozewicz

Widely held to be the most influential Polish poet of a generation that includes Czeslaw Milosz and Wislawa Szymborska, Tadeusz R￠?§ewicz gives voice in the sharpest, most disturbing way to the crisis of values that has plagued our civilization. Joanna Trzeciak's new translation displays R￠?§ewicz''s supernatural simplicity, his stark diction and sudden turns.

From "regression into the primordial soup"
finally I too came into the world
in the year 1921 and suddenly . . .
atchoo! time passes I am old and forgot where I put my glasses
I forgot there was
history Caesar Hitler Mata Hari
Stalin capitalism communism
Einstein Picasso Al Capone
Alka Seltzer Al Qaeda

Tadeusz R=zewicz was born in Radomsko, Poland, in 1921. During the Nazi occupation he joined the Polish resistance. Following the war, at the age of twenty-six, he published his first collection of poems, Anxiety, which was received as the work of a major poet and redefined poetry after the Holocaust. A prolific poet and major playwright, R=zewicz lives in Wroclaw, Poland.