East & West is a full-length collection of poems, with cover art by artist Alison Barrows-Young. Sandpoint, Idaho: Lost Horse Press, 2016.

Each day we wake and begin an interior dialogue about what is ethical and what is tolerable on this planet. Poet and translator Piotr Florczyk demonstrates in his lyrical evocations what that conversation might look like as he negotiates the distance between urban and wild, settled and migrant, Krakow and Los Angeles. Piotr Florczyk’s literary elders showed us all how to think wisely, deeply, and with dark humor, about the last hundred years, and now Florczyk himself leads us boldly forward into the 21st century, weaving those very same gifts into fabulist’s miniatures of wonder and play.

—Sandra Alcosser, author of Except by Nature and A Fish to Feed All Hunger

Drawn in lines that transcend all physical laws, then drawn in lines that attend to such painful, blessed limits, East & West is a gorgeous testament to the glory of being alive. It’s a rare poet who truly widens our vision of the human, who can give us an honest hope, despite it all, despite it all…and Piotr Florczyk belongs to this rarity.

—Katie Ford, author of Blood Lyrics, Colosseum, and Deposition

Beneath the deceptive, plain speech of Piotr Florczyk’s best poems lies a jarring assessment of American society that only a poet fluent in two tongues might tell: a backyard where field mice show up with “BB gunshot wounds,” where newlyweds bring “suitcases full of sticks, tin foil scraps, dead flies,” and where under the “quilt of lawn” one finds “hands waving in the air.” We discover that within our once pastoral life, “No one complains if, out of / boredom, I slingshot rocks at their windows, but when I stagger with a story of the sun / climbing a fire escape in the rain, they ask not for the ending but for silence, something / like a furrow or a dagger.” East & West is an outstanding book.

—Mark Irwin, author of American Urn: Selected Poems (1987-2014)

Buy a signed copy of East & West. Domestic shipping included in price ($18)