Piotr Florczyk

Brings together two intimate, reflective essays by two acclaimed poets, Ilya Kaminsky and Piotr Florczyck, as they revisit their hometowns of Odesa and Kraków, exploring the complexities of return, memory, and identity. Within, Without: On Two Cities presents two essays by Eastern European–born poets and translators, Ilya Kaminsky and Piotr Florczyk, now based in the United States. Revisiting their respective hometowns—Odesa and Kraków—they grapple with questions of history, identity, and belonging. What does it mean for an immigrant or refugee to return? Can one ever truly go back to a homeland that has since been transformed? Kaminsky and Florczyk chart a path forward by embracing the complexities of their transnational and translingual identities, as artists and as human beings.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. As a former world-ranked swimmer whose journey toward naturalization and U. S. citizenship began with a swimming fellowship, Piotr Florczyk reflects on his own adventures in swimming pools while taking a closer look at artists, architects, writers, and others who have helped to cement the swimming pool’s prominent and iconic role in our society and culture. Swimming Pool explores the pool as a place where humans seek to attain the unique union between mind and body. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

This sequence of poems (taken from Florczyk's full-length collection From the Annals of Krakow, published in the USA in 2106) is based on the testimonies of Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust.

Born of hours spent watching and listening to the testimonies of Polish Holocaust survivors and those who came to their aid, these poems by noted Polish poet Piotr Florczyk document the unspeakable evil unleashed by the Nazis in Poland, while also interrogating the very concept of memory literature. With fewer and fewer Holocaust survivors living among us each year,From the Annals of Kraków retells their stories of persecution, perseverance, and luck so they will continue to be heard and will keep alive the memory of survivors' suffering and bravery.

Whether questioning the afterlife of the Berlin Wall or taking a fresh look at kitchenware - "The peeler / loves the grater the way / the heirloom tea cup loves the saucer" - poet Piotr Florczyk investigates themes of identity, politics, and memory while wrestling with what it is that makes us human.

Barefoot is a powerfully distinctive debut, written in an engaging, attractive style, crammed full of lyrical moments that turn the expected and commonplace into something else. The poems, reflecting on the present, draw on memory, time and language with an acute awareness of the past that maps the idea of place and home.