Kwaśne obole

Jakub Sęczyk’s poems are spare, laconic and at times strategically withholding. They call to mind the observational logic of the Objectivist poems of the mid-20th century, with their close attention to the natural appearance and sound of things, only with an essential, pronounced caveat: in the media-saturated environment of the early 21st century, with its deepfakes, robocalls and retail politics, the attentive mind has learned to distrust that anything is what it seems to be, or that there is any longer the possibility of seeing and hearing things as they really are, including one’s own feelings and interior perceptions.

Sour Obols, Sęczyk’s follow-up to his award-winning 2022 volume Święta pracy (Work Holidays), mines demotic language and the mounting anxieties of daily life in late capitalism to find museum-worthy artefacts of beauty and heartbreak: the shattering revelation that emerges from a slightly misheard cliché, the impression of light that breaks through – or crashes into – sleep and/or love. These are poems that, in their often radical concision, seem like they’ve ended before they’ve begun, and that therefore must be repeated, though it is the rereading itself that reveals how nothing can ever be truly repeated. Like the ‘obols’ referenced in the collection’s title, what was once valuable enough to kill for or to bury with the dead will eventually become one with the dirt, only to be rediscovered later as treasure.