Description
Book SynopsisIn her audacious debut To Feed the Stone, Bronka Nowicka offers writing that is both timeless and timely. Using the language of folk narrative, like Italo Calvino, Russell Edson and Jan Svankmajer before her, Nowicka’s prose poems take us through the stark and disorienting world of a child––a world that excavates the border of appearances in a constant search for the essence of connection. The poet reconfigures the dynamics between people and objects, cause and effect, the body and the outside world, and the tenuous boundaries between death and life. As Nowicka’s child-narrator poignantly observes after discovering the body of a dead family member: “Her head was hanging over the armrest, her mouth open wide as if, with her whole body, she was taking the last photo of this world.” An ant ground between fingers smells of vinegar. A butterfly has powder, a mole has a tailcoat. You can roll filth down your skin. Old people smell like borsch. You have butter behind your fingernails where splinters can get in. There are hunch-backed people and crazy people but not dogs or birds. Sucking on the salty knee, the child knows: the only thing that separates you from the world is the skin. Thanks to skin, you’re not swallowed up by the vastness of things. Excerpt of “Tights” from To Feed the Stone
Trade Review"disciplined, sharp-as-a-knife, cutting poetic prose... It is a dark tale, full of anxiety and unanswered questions (...). This is a book that stays with you for a long time after reading, ” -Nike Award jury member, Tomasz Fiałkowski “Every so often a writer comes along who shows us what literature can and perhaps is meant to do — offering not so much a different perspective as a different way of seeing. A writer whose work inhabits a space undetermined by convention, trends, topics of current interest, unafraid to put aside the noise of daily life and explore the unnoticed –– unseen because ignored –– life that is nevertheless fully within our grasp. A writer who captures the human by engaging the beings that share the world with us and bringing forth their voice. Bronka Nowicka is a mystic writer, poet, and filmmaker who converses with objects so that we can hear and understand what they are telling us. Hers is a world of myth –– our own –– in deep conversation with science and with our time.” ––JP Apruzzese, LIT Magazine
