folio : Three from Viscera: Eight Voices from
Poland
,
edited by Mark Tardi
from “Huba” and Kaleidoscope
For me, writing is mostly about taking in one’s surroundings.
About narrating the organic and the inorganic. About describing things mobile
and immobile. It’s about looking outward as far as possible and inward as
deeply as possible. To dissect the human body. To dissect the animal body. To
dissect one’s own body and those of others. To dissect each planet like a peach
and extract the pit. To inspect a water droplet under a microscope. To see the
entire observable universe through a telescope. To tear one’s own heart into
strips, like mozzarella. To engage the language of science, biology, medicine,
physics, and the heart. To hold a handful of matter. To pour the same fluids
into increasingly newer vessels. Nothing abstract, everything figurative.
trismus
biting down on the skin
of the world, the skin of a continent,
the skin of this country,
the skin of a professor, the skin of an atomic
bomb, the skin of a
neutrino whizzing through the body
without a trace
biting down and bearing
daughters,
naming them Hemolysis and
Scoliosis,
naming them Vanity and
Conflagration
biting down on their carotid arteries
Translated from the Polish by Lynn Suh
from Viscera: Eight Voices from Poland, edited by Mark Tardi
Litmus Press, 2024 :
reprinted with permission,
Anna Adamowicz (b. 1993) in Lubin. She is a laboratory diagnostician, poet, and author of the volumes Wątpia [Doubt], Animalia, and Nebula. She has been nominated for the Gdynia Literary Award, and has been a two-time finalist of “Połów” (2012, 2016), as well as nominated for the main prize in the 19th Jacek Bierezin National Poetry Prize. She lives in Wrocław.
