Both plain-spoken and luminous . . . Szymborskas is the best of the Western mindfree, restless, questioning. New York Times Book Review
A New York Times Editors Choice
One of Europes greatest poets is also its wisest, wittiest, and most accessible. Nobel Prize winner Wislawa Szymborska draws us in with her unexpected, unassuming humor. If you want the world in a nutshell, a Polish critic remarked, try Szymborska. But the world held in these lapidary poems is larger than the one we thought we knew.
Edited by her longtime, award-winning translator, Clare Cavanagh, Map traces Szymborskas work until her death in 2012. Of the approximately two hundred fiftypoems included here, nearly forty arenewly translated; thirteen represent the entirety of the poets last Polish collection, Enough, never before published in English. Map offers Szymborskas devoted readers a welcome return to her ironic elegance (TheNew Yorker).
Vast, intimate, and charged with the warmth of a life fully imagined to the end. Theres no better place for those unfamiliar with her work to begin. Vogue
Her poems offer a restorative wit as playful as it is steely and as humble as it is wise . . . Her wry acceptance of lifes folly remains her strongest weapon against tyranny and bad taste. Los Angeles Times Book Review