Strata is a series of interconnected lyric prose poems that fluctuate between order and chaos like flocks of swallows rearranging themselves in flight. The rhythmic oscillation of the poems builds into a postmodern story that weaves through the life of a poet who’s migrated from Poland to the U.S. The world is magnificently large from any vantage point and Chrusciel helps us locate something larger than ourselves by constantly holding both the particular of her life and the universe at each moment. With the title, Strata, meaning "loss" in Polish and "accretion" in English, Chrusciel braids, juxtaposes, and synthesizes through repetition, despite a wide range of subjects. Her alchemy includes exquisite details about parents and ancestry, the paradoxes of belonging to two languages, the miracles of existence, the joy and angst of love and belonging, the sorrow and dislocation of Eastern block politics, and a chorus of spiritual incantation and transient revelation.

Strata

Literature & Fiction

Chrusciel, Ewa

Poetry

Emergency Press

In her book, Chrusciel maps the biblical event of annunciation onto the current migration crises. Annunciation becomes a symbol of the “yes” that we utter in front of reality, particularly confronted with exiles, strangers―in other words, the other. The book quivers on the brink between openness to the other and the terror the other brings out in us. What does it mean to say “yes” to a stranger? What implications, threats, blessings and responsibilities do “yes” carry? Can we say “yes” to a dislocated soul in order to become more fully who we were meant to be?

Of Annunciations

Omnidawn

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

Lyrical satire that imagines mental illnesses as various bird species.\nEwa Chrusciel’s fourth book in English, Yours, Purple Gallinule, playfully explores health and illness as they are culturally constructed. Using research into clinical understandings of mental afflictions and their treatments through history, Chrusciel maps various diagnostics onto an array of bird species. A lyrical satire, the book is a reflection on a society that tends to over-diagnose, misdiagnose, and over-medicate. These poems pose questions about what it means to be unique and to accept pain and suffering as a fact of life.\nOn the pages of Yours, Purple Gallinule, we encounter birds, a poet, and a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist undergoes a series of conversions as she realizes that the point is not to classify thoughtlessly, but to “make music instead”—to dwell in astonishment. Birds evade the anthropomorphizing intentions of the human protagonists as the psychiatrist and the poet eventually become one. The anthropomorphizing goes in reverse, and the human being becomes more avian. Like the dove in the biblical Noah’s ark story, the bird proclaims a new covenant, with a twig in its beak and a message: “We are all mad; some more than others, but no one is spared the affliction. And the madder we are, the more sacred.”

Yours, Purple Gallinule

Contraband of Hoopoe explores issues of dislocation, immigration and desire. Chrusciel invents a poetics of smuggling as she crosses national, historical and linguistic borders. The migratory narrative is distinctly errant, haunted by a childhood lived under a Communist regime, by the austerity of Eastern block politics, and by the possibility of discovering a fleeting language to carry the seeds of illicit revelation, spiritual transformation, and insight. The book elevates smuggling to a noble art, recording how the Jewish people were hidden and transported during the Holocaust. Chrusciel tracks a series of historical objects and secret messages that immigrants throughout history have been sneaking through customs, past border checkpoints, and across the seas.

Contraband of Hoopoe

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Books by Chrusciel, Ewa

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Chrusciel, Ewa. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Strata

Of Annunciations

Strata

Yours, Purple Gallinule

Contraband of Hoopoe