Dialogue and Influence: Essays on Polish and American Poets. Academic Studies Press, 2025.

This book weds a commitment to translation studies to historical and conceptual questions about translation, literary influence, and global literary networks by highlighting the fantastically generative dialogue that Polish and American poets have engaged in since the 1960s. They have translated each other’s work and learned how to write new kinds of poems in the process. In some cases, they have written poems addressed to each other. The canons of Polish poetry in the US and of American poetry in Poland are necessarily missing some key figures, but they are constantly being revised, with new names and works added every year, including writings by translingual Polish American poets who straddle both literary communities. These essays celebrate the ongoing transfer while also setting up the stage for things to come.

“One of the great transnational cultural conversations took place between Polish and American poetry during the Cold War. Piotr Florczyk’s new book, Dialogue and Influence: Essays on Polish and American Poets, shows how this conversation continued in the following decades, deepening and broadening through the works of poets such as Julia Fiedorczuk, Ewa Lipska, Piotr Gwiazda, Charles Bernstein, Jorie Graham, and Jacek Gutorow, among others. His study illuminates the myriad forms the exchanges took—through criticism, translation, and translingual practices—giving us new ways to read both Polish and American poetry but also prompting us to wonder where one ends and the other begins. As he remarks, this is a good problem to have. It’s arguably the right problem for us all to have if we’re interested in the art and traditions of poetry.” 

—Justin Quinn, University of West Bohemia, author of Between Two Fires: Transnationalism and Cold War Poetry (2015) 

“For Anglophone readers, Polish poetry, when not merely ignored, is often defined and distorted by the frames of the Holocaust and the Cold War. An accomplished translator and poet, Piotr Florczyk provides a bracing corrective. Florczyk both demonstrates and embodies the connections and discontinuities between Polish poets and American poets. In a series of cogent, compelling essays, Dialogue and Influence: Essays on Polish and American Poets analyzes transcultural relations and translations. I cannot imagine a more informed, passionate, and trustworthy guide to this subject than Piotr Florczyk.”

—Steven G. Kellman, UT-San Antonio, author The Translingual Imagination and Nimble Tongues

“Piotr Florczyk’s Dialogue and Influence: Essays on Polish and American Poets is a long-due inquiry into the creative conversation among American and Polish poets and translators that reveals both the complexity of their lyrical and affective engagement and their concrete response to one another.  The author brings to our attention the distinct, individual poetic worlds and integrates them into a continuous creative exchange. In so doing, he reconstructs and redefines the polyphony and adds his own voice, resonant with enthusiasm and insight.”

—Bożena Shallcross, The University of Chicago