Gagarin Street

From the title poem of Piotr Gwiazdas impressive debut collection, a recurring theme announces itself: altered history and the poets qualified attempts at recognition, if not full reclamation. Over and over, we follow along haunted streets real and imagined, sharing our guides disorientation as the excavated past offers little clue to the future. Names have been changed, but not to protect the innocent. This book is full of terrific, lively poems I wish Id written. --Gaylord Brewer Piotr Gwiazdas Gagarin Street summons not a Kierkegaardian either/or, but the subtly complex both/and of Eastern European masters Tadeusz Rozewicz and Vladimir Holan. A scoreless song; just deepening uncertainty and silencefew can tell this tale as Gwiazda can, a tale of clouds . . . dense like Philosophical Investigations, a tale and a teller strong enough to question whether the man I am should cease to be? These poems remind us how easily the Gagarin Streets of our youth may disappear, and of the poets vital task to re-inscribe them for the futures fellow travelers.Mark Nowak The personae of these wry, arresting poems yield their secrets slowly, when they choose to at all. Piotr Gwiazdas world is one without certainties, where men and women communicate mainly by accident, where the streets of ones hometown have all been renameda world both hypothetical and futuristic yet very much of this moment, home and exile no longer distinguishable. Beneath these compelling, elusive surfaces moves a penetrating and skeptical intelligence, like his characters simultaneously a refugee and a refuge. Peter Schmitt