Strata

In Ewa Chrusciel’s first book in English, Strata, an exile’s memories are . . . at once a rapture of possession (of being possessed) and defeatingly untotalizable. Strata is . . . a tumultuous revelation of how much of the past there still is, right here in the near flight of letters, and of the burn of being in time at all, the difficulty of catching up with oneself in a universe that is never one, but always scattered. Strata is a book of concuspiscences, of combings for pleasures, yes, but even more for the Sacred Book it wants to be. In its every line, it shows that the rhapsodic is the right approach to the truth about the world. —from the foreword by Calvin Bedient Praise for Ewa Chrusciel’s poetry “With a wonderful insistence, each phrase in Ewa Chrusciel’s prose poetry can be experienced as a moment of transition, of what Emerson would have called a darting aim. “Whenever we visited, my grandfather would put his chair on the road and wait,” Chrusciel writes. “Kraina na Bosaka. We were the apparition of deer. Pray, why chase each stalk of wounded light?”’ —Tony Brinkley, Boston Review