Collected Father

"Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further." This, from Rainier Maria Rilke-a poet with more than a passing familiarity with emotional extremity. And it may well be the driving force behind John Pijewski's second book of poetry, COLLECTED FATHER. Both of his parents were prisoners in Nazi labor camps and experienced unimaginable suffering. Tragically, they carried that brutality into the lives of their children, long after the war had ended. The poems collected here represent decades of writing, and not only recreate the psychological and physical terrors one child became heir to, they allow us to experience how the poet's indomitable imagination refused to be extinguished by them. Pijewski both preserves history within these poems and, simultaneously, attempts to melt it down within the furnace of furious metaphor and tender music. The poems he casts from this material are heart-wrenching, sometimes nightmarishly comic, and consistently bracing. When it feels as if this poet could not go "any further," the poems demonstrate to our surprise that love, too, has survived the flames, tempering the steel of these verses.

-Steven Ratiner

author of Grief's Apostrophe and Poet Laureate Emeritus of Arlington, MA

These grim and at times darkly comic poems tell the story of a Polish couple and their American sons, in which the appalling horrors of the old world are far from lost in the new. John Pijewski has written, in his own unmistakable voice, a real book, not just a random collection, and it is simply-and not so simply-riveting. Collected Father is the most original and hair-raising new book of poems I've read in a very long time.

-Lloyd Schwartz

Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and author most recently of Who's on First? New and Selected Poems