The Scent of Man

Tadeusz Dabrowski's poetry is as beguiling, reflective and precise as a thousand fragments from a shattered hall of mirrors. Whether observing laundry or the military, our cravings for bread or literature, the poems blend the low and the high with a startling grace. They demonstrate that the messiness of human experience, its visceral realities, the carnal truths of the body, our small joys and inevitable decay, are all part of the same fragile narrative. This poetry moves intimately through spaces, sacred and profane, and suggests we are never fully in one world or the other but constantly drifting between them. TADEUSZ DABROWSKI (b. 1979)Poet, essayist, critic. Editor-in-chiefof the literary bimonthly Topos. He hasbeen published in The New Yorker, ParisReview, Boston Review, Threepenny Review, Ploughshares, Agni, American PoetryReview, Poetry Daily, Guernica, amongothers. Recipient of stipends awarded by Yaddo (2015), the OmiInternational Arts Center (NY, 2013), and the Vermont StudioCenter (2011). Winner of numerous awards, among others, theKoscielski Prize (2009), the Hubert Burda Prize (2008) and, from Tadeusz Rózewicz, the Prize of the Foundation for PolishCulture (2006). He has been nominated for the NIKE Award(2010). His work has been translated into 30 languages. Authorof ten volumes of poetry in his native Polish, from which themost recent are Scrabble (2020) and To jest fajka (2022) [Thisis a pipe], and a dozen in translation. He has also publisheda novel, Bezbronna kreska (2016) [Defenseless line], set inNew York City, and a collection of essays on poetry, entitledIn Metaphor (2024). Two of his collections, Black Squareand POSTS, have been published in English by Zephyr Press.He lives in Gdansk on the Baltic coast of Poland.