Landless Boys, the first ever English-language volume of translations of poems by Jerzy Jarniewicz, one of Poland’s most important contemporary voices, presents more than forty poems, including from Mondo cane, for which he was awarded the 2022 Nike Award. Cheshire, MA: MadHat Press, 2023. 

In Jerzy Jarniewicz’s Landless Boys—which comes to us through Piotr Florczyk’s wonderful English translation—sacrilege and the sacred repeatedly weave through each other. Sex and eros are neither romanticized nor profaned, but simply—and inexorably—present. Grand-scale human thinking becomes diminished by its proximity to daily activity, and private lives exist quietly inside the machinery of history and civilization. By the end, this ambitious, brilliant, understated book has offered an astonishingly broad depiction of human experience—inside of which the individual mind is forever navigating the inescapability of both the body and the present moment. 

—Wayne Miller, award-winning poet, translator, and editor of Copper Nickel