Landless Boys by Jerzy Jarniewicz
Praise for Landless Boys
In Jerzy Jarniewicz’s Landless Boys—which comes to us through Piotr Florczyk’s wonderful English translation—sacrilege and the sacred repeatedly weave through each other. Sex and eros are neither romanticized nor profaned, but simply—and inexorably—present. Grand-scale human thinking becomes diminished by its proximity to daily activity, and private lives exist quietly inside the machinery of history and civilization. By the end, this ambitious, brilliant, understated book has offered an astonishingly broad depiction of human experience—inside of which the individual mind is forever navigating the inescapability of both the body and the present moment.
—Wayne Miller
Landless Boys
When the bank repossessed his plot outside
the city limits, and his pal, who clumsily played
his guarantor, stopped recognizing him,
we went to the meadow, to splash
in the Pilica River. In my bag I brought a Scholl’s
nail clipper, since it’s come in handy before, ditto
the sub, which we, as if pinned down
by hunger, split and ate right away, though
it wasn’t a hunger in the basic
sense of the word. Reshuffling began on the meadow.
Ants took charge—on our heels, between
our toes, on the straps of two hastily dropped pairs
of sandals. The sun was fulfilling, the finger nails
dug into the ground, and the river, in defiance,
was no longer a border.
the city limits, and his pal, who clumsily played
his guarantor, stopped recognizing him,
we went to the meadow, to splash
in the Pilica River. In my bag I brought a Scholl’s
nail clipper, since it’s come in handy before, ditto
the sub, which we, as if pinned down
by hunger, split and ate right away, though
it wasn’t a hunger in the basic
sense of the word. Reshuffling began on the meadow.
Ants took charge—on our heels, between
our toes, on the straps of two hastily dropped pairs
of sandals. The sun was fulfilling, the finger nails
dug into the ground, and the river, in defiance,
was no longer a border.
Paperback: 124 pages
Publisher: Madhat, Inc.
Language: English
ISBN-13: 978-1-952335-65-5
Publisher: Madhat, Inc.
Language: English
ISBN-13: 978-1-952335-65-5
