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REVIEWS
Strata is a series of interconnected lyric prose poems that fluctuate between order and chaos like flocks of swallows rearranging themselves in flight. The rhythmic oscillation of the poems builds into a postmodern story that weaves through the life of a poet who’s migrated from Poland to the U.S. The world is magnificently large from any vantage point and Chrusciel helps us locate something larger than ourselves by constantly holding both the particular of her life and the universe at each moment. With the title, Strata, meaning "loss" in Polish and "accretion" in English, Chrusciel braids, juxtaposes, and synthesizes through repetition, despite a wide range of subjects. Her alchemy includes exquisite details about parents and ancestry, the paradoxes of belonging to two languages, the miracles of existence, the joy and angst of love and belonging, the sorrow and dislocation of Eastern block politics, and a chorus of spiritual incantation and transient revelation.
“Whatever it is—a fractal love story, an epistolary novel, a prose poem sequence, a family memoir, a linguistic meditation, a palimpsest, a lyrical inquiry into the sciences, or a delightful deviance from them all—Strata is a beautifully fraught mediation between the centripetal and centrifugal forces of language, between a language of endless beginnings and a language of endless conclusions. She’s walking in a direction I think we should all consider heading, to a place where the reader and the writer are both alert and alive and well—despite the arguments of the past fifty years...and because of the arguments of the past fifty years.” — Jayson Iwen, judge for the Emergency Press International Book Contest and author of Six Trips in Two Directions and The Momentary Jokebook.
ORDER March 2011 (U.S. release) / trade paper / ISBN 978-0-9830226-0 / 5" x 8" / 80 pages / Poetry / $15.00 (U.S.) / editor: Bryan Tomasovich / book design: Mae Emerick / cover art: Katy Black Brooks / drawings: Crystal Fosnaugh Available in print or as an ebook at Indiebound, Powell's, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Google, Apple, and more. Main distributors are Ingram and Baker & Taylor.
ABOUT EMERGENCY PRESS Emergency Press is based in New York and publishes explorative books of fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and emergent forms that fall outside traditional categories. Every year, the press hosts an international contest for book-length examinations of a single topic. EP books are carried by major distributors and wholesalers, and available in bookstores across the nation and through major online booksellers.
CONTACT Bryan Tomasovich 206 331 7477 btomasovich@emergencypress.org
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