Irgendjemand hier verschiebt die Kommas Joanna Bociąg & Tomasz Różycki

"your daughters' throats are tied / every time you say / they're beautiful and smart / every time you think how / defenseless." For her debut book Boję się o ostatnią kobietę (Dom Literatury 2020), roughly: I'm Afraid for the Last Woman, Joanna Bociąg (born in 1989 in Poznań) has won many awards in Poland. Literary critic Marta Koronkiewicz describes the volume as a book constructed with extreme precision, an example of poetic reductionism that is in no way detrimental to the complexity of what is presented. In linguistically very spare and concise poems, Bociąg develops a coherent, multilayered self-emancipation.

Tomasz Różycki (born in Opole in 1970) belongs to a different generation of Polish poetry. His volume Kolonien, now available in German translation by Bernhard Hartmann in edition.fotoTAPETA, is one of nine volumes of poetry and was already published in the Polish original in 2006. In 77 numbered, formally uniform sonnets, Różycki deals with a variety of topics, such as the double homelessness of his family, which came from Lviv and was forcibly relocated to the former German city of Opole, images of childhood memories, the writing of poetry, and the "fact that someone who was struck down on paper / can live on in life."

The event will be interpreted Polish-German.

In reading and conversation: Joanna Bociąg | Tomasz Różycki.
Moderation: Karolina Golimowska