Scattering the Dark offers a lively selection of Poland’s women poets writing before and after the fall of communism. In eight thematic chapters, this book reveals how the influential literary tradition of Miłosz and Szymborska continues to evolve as younger generations turn from their country’s tragic history to a poetry of ordinary experience and language play.

“Wow! What a book! The tradition of women’s writing that flows out of the work of Symborska and Anna Świr — the way this mighty tradition turns in the hands of a younger generation from the traumatic history of their country to a poetics of everyday life, of play, and experiment. An absolutely rich and appealing book.” —Robert Hass

“These cosmopolitan, multilingual poets speak to us across the decades, overcoming a great silence, redirecting the myths, reimagining the role of the poet, and the nature of poetry itself.  Scattering the Dark is a useful, subversive, even necessary anthology.”  —Edward Hirsch

“Scattering the Dark is a stock of human condition so polyphonic that it’s hard to believe all the poems collected here were written in one single country and language. This is a passionate, mournful, erotic book of astonished lives.” — Valzhyna Mort

Karen Kovacik received a 2011 NEA Fellowship in Literary Translation and a 2004-5 Fulbright Research Grant to Poland. Her translation of Agnieszka Kuciak’s Distant Lands: An Anthology of Poets Who Don’t Exist appeared from White Pine in 2013, longlisted for the National Translation Award in 2014. Professor of English at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, she’s the author of the poetry collections Beyond the Velvet Curtain and Metropolis Burning.

Scattering the Dark: An Anthology of Polish Women Poets
Edited by Karen Kovacik
2016, White Pine Press
ISBN: 978-1935210825