Description

Jakub Kornhauser

Translated by Piotr Florczyk

Hemorrhages & Squirrels

ISBN: 9781956921601 (pbk.)

(September 15, 2025) 

Hemorrhages & Squirrels is a collection of prose poems by one of Poland’s young literary stars. While its subjects and themes seem arbitrary, the associative aspect is foregrounded, and it’s best not to try to figure things out. This is also true of the volume’s intertextual roots, as the poems feature various props lifted from the work of Adam Zagajewski and Julian Kornhauser (the poet’s father). This work is meant to feel sudden and fleeting, chaotic, even, but also thrilling, especially since reading a Jakub Kornhauser poem will lead you to begin in one place and end up someplace else.

Jakub Kornhauser’s Hemorrhages & Squirrels, translated by Piotr Florczyk, reminds me of another poet, yet I’m not sure that poet exists, which is to say, Kornhauser is an original. Here are prose poems that try and define with intentionally declarative telling titles such as “Poem About Remembrance” or “Poem About Fatherland” or “Poem Not About Fatherland,” as if to suggest over and over that setting out to define (or via negativa) can only expand the imagination. 

—Victoria Chang, author of With My Back to the World and OBIT

Brief as these prose poems appear, beneath their blandly repetitive titles, they cover an uncanny territory that belies diminutive form. Jakub Kornhauser achieves this breadth by leaping and dodging, without ever seeming to know where he’s headed or might land next. The effect feels satirical at times, digressive at others, and often feels disquieting. Kornhauser’s intuitive shifts in tone are as exhilarating as they are unsettling. This translation of Hemorrhages & Squirrels is a welcome gift to readers, who have frankly too little access to contemporary poetry beyond the borders of English.

—David Axelrod, author of Skiing with Dostoyevsky: New & Selected Poems