Sunbather by Sylvia Dziewaltowska

“Dziewaltowska’s preoccupation with approximation, with the impression something makes (as opposed to the thing itself) creates intoxicating, uncanny, and powerful sites for exploration. Sunbather is an unforgettable debut.”

–Emily Skillings

“This is a book in reverence for the last of things, for using the mind’s powers and limits, to make more of what is left. It is not an elegy for earth but a song on the edge. Here is a maximalist spirit breath-pressurized into a wish, an earth trying to stay alive in the mind while crowding onto the last isthmus, the last resource of a voice divorced from its source body. Dziewaltowska does not lead us to understanding but to significant estrangement—in it, a frightening and delightful recognition of something called feeling or self or world or life.”

–Elizabeth Metzger

“If, when the poet writes of the day, they mean the poem and if language’s capacity for history is not simply as a recording device but the “architecture of that possible,” then the vital ecology of Sylvia Dziewaltowska’s Sunbather comes into clear view when she writes, “Something ancient stirs inside the day.” I love this revelatory work that picks at hiddenness as if it were a fresh wound. Fresh is right for this luminous debut book of poems that sustains what anyone would hope to write, a sense of awe for what language brings into being, spot lit with “light…[splitting] the marbled expectation.”

–Ted Dodson

“These poems surprise again and again, each time in a slightly different way, first because of their confidence—they read like fully arrived poems, and so the reader thinks they know the poems, only to be startled out of their complacency by that most difficult to achieve thing: the unexpected line that is also the right line. Great things are coming from Sylvia Dziewaltowska, and great things are here.”

–Shane McCrae           

“When poetry creates its own music, something happens in the world. Something of the order of magic that makes time and space alter their nature. There is something hypnotic in the rhythm of these poems as if the author wanted to tell us that poetry comes from a mysterious city inhabited by those who wish to live on the bluepale surface of everything. Or again: that poetry is like an endless journey back to a home we have forgotten the name of and will never reach.”

–Cecilia Pavon