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 DĄBROWSKI (b. 1979)

Poet, essayist, critic. Editor-in-chief

of the literary bimonthly Topos. He has

been published in The New Yorker, Paris

Review, Boston Review, Threepenny Review,

Ploughshares, Agni, American Poetry

Review, Poetry Daily, Guernica, among

others. Recipient of stipends awarded by Yaddo (2015), the Omi

International Arts Center (NY, 2013), and the Vermont Studio

Center (2011). Winner of numerous awards, among others, the

Kościelski Prize (2009), the Hubert Burda Prize (2008) and,

from Tadeusz Różewicz, the Prize of the Foundation for Polish

Culture (2006). He has been nominated for the NIKE Award

(2010). His work has been translated into 30 languages. Author

of ten volumes of poetry in his native Polish, from which the

most recent are Scrabble (2020) and To jest fajka (2022) [This

is a pipe], and a dozen in translation. He has also published

a novel, Bezbronna kreska (2016) [Defenseless line], set in

New York City, and a collection of essays on poetry, entitled

In Metaphor (2024). Two of his collections, Black Square

and POSTS, have been published in English by Zephyr Press.

He lives in Gdańsk on the Baltic coast of Poland.