A Marzipan Factory

A Marzipan Factory is the most original and enticing book of poems I have read in years. It is Kafkaesque and yet tender, cynical and yet warm, elliptical and yet wholly immediate. Grzegorz Wroblewski can take the most ordinary of phenomena and then give them the twist of a knife: to spare the life of a living organism - a dry tangerine for instance - is, from another angle, to forget it. The pleasures and terrors of sex, of age, of the fear of death, of the deceptions of our social life, have rarely been so brutally - yet wittily and charmingly - documented as they are in these short, often gnomic poems, surprisingly well rendered in Adam Zdrodowski s translation. Grzegorz Wroblewski restores one s faith in the power of lyric poetry to renew itself. -Marjorie Perloff

Grzegorz Wroblewski's poems are ironic and serious, quick and probing, nailed to place and character but soaring in imagination. If you haven't read his poems, it's not too late to start and this new volume is the perfect place to do that. -John Z. Guzlowski