Kamil Bouska
Petr Hruska
The door always used to swing shut, by itself, for years and years, with measured haste. / Now it stands utterly still.
Justin Quinn: Bohuslav Reynek’s Journeys
By remembering how many foreign debts anglophone poetry has accrued over the centuries of its existence ... we are reminded that a poet like Reynek, who seems to emerge from a faraway country of which we know little, is part of the same tradition ... This is lyric poetry of a type in which the poet uses certain patterns of rhyme and pacing that many previous generations have. It is a way of finding likenesses in both words and the world, or sometimes impressing phonic likenesses on disparate experiences, and savoring the phases of that difference.
Radka Thea Otipkova
You must be hungry, he said. / A magnificent sentence like that, / the last I remember him saying.
Vitezslav Nezval
On the beds/ Of a lantern-lit hospital/ A doctor/ Playing the flute/ Revives/ Dead tubercular women
Jonas Hajek
A hooker / gives me the come on. Whether I really // don’t want anything. I don’t, even if / I think about it afterwards.
Tereza Riedlbauchova
the ceaseless forgetting and reminiscing about pleasure / maybe two swans on the Seine / maybe one
Petr Hruska
I had never seen / such a narrow room / when we wanted to turn around / we had to embrace