Collected Father by John Pijewski

$23.99

“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

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Collected Father

by John Pijewski

Full-length, paper

979-8-89990-310-6

2026

The poems in Collected Father were written by a son about his father born in the dark shadows of Polish history in the early 20^th century. Stark poverty. A brutish peasant father. Three brutal years in a Nazi labor camp during WW II. These poems are intimate, emotional, and heartbreaking. Their violence is disturbing. They sometimes inhabit the territory where blackest humor rules. Yet the poems, despite their darkness, are charged with language and images that erupt into unexpected beauty. After the war the father arrives in mid-century America with a wife, also a Nazi labor camp survivor, and an infant son born in a German Displaced Persons camp. He fathers a new American son on whom he visits shades of the abuse he’d endured in Poland and the labor camp. Trying to understand his damaged father turns out to be the only way the son can show him love, but the father makes that nearly impossible. The poems in Collected Father exist in the province between Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird and Franz Kafka’s Letter to His Father. They show that the Holocaust’s effects can traverse oceans and time to add a generational chapter to the library of Holocaust literature. #Holocaust #second-generation Holocaust experience #Polish refugees in America #father-son relationship #domestic violence

John Pijewski is the author of a book of poems, Dinner with Uncle Jozef, published by Wesleyan University Press. Collected Father is John’s second book of poems. His poetry has appeared in The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, Tri-Quarterly, Seneca Review, Poetry Northwest, The New Yorker, and other journals.

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