An act of spinal surgery opens up a poetic examination of the sociocultural forces that aim to reshape women
The Spine
the spine string of pearls undone with a deft gesture
then through a series of tiny skilled moves threaded again
string of glass beads Native Americans
sell Manhattan Island to the Dutch
girls with scoliosis have
more than the Inuit for snow
expressions for frustration
companion to disease
the spine is not an organ where you can hide
no soft diverticula
no carapace
a bone tissue palisade
Corseting
the spine river rainbowing in carpenter’s pencil
kaolin silverpoint
methyl violet cotton blue
the body scaffold for sculpture
adhesion
clustering
of plaster strips bandages
curing with a snake squeezing ribs
shallowed breath
white shell with hollow breast protrusions
curvature of back
bend of river
tattered body meat plaster
the loss of plaster into polymer
the tightening of straps
the fusion of skins
First Stanza for Max Blecher
darkroom cadaver cavern my brother my bright stereoscope
how pain leads us by the hand into other worlds
what we find there
the spine turning its back to numerous tiny incisions
the type of wistfulness that escapes the fingertips
the string sliding a stack of mismatched halves
a stone below the ocean a corset like glass armour
the sharp pulse of neuralgia fotoplastikon of x-ray film
Corseting Again
girl with scoliosis time for therapy
swallow one by one:
half-naked in the x-ray lab
chill lack of breath needle beams
spine negative little white river between ribs
hands dozens handling back shoulders hips
dimensions measures dressings diagnoses decrees
corset of resin and leather most beautiful instrument of torture
touch unclench the jaw let yourself be sponged up
from clavicle to hip crest you are a stranger to yourself
hard standoffish emitting a muffled sound
try to bend down girl
try to reach your clitoris
Translated by Mira Rosenthal
An act of spinal surgery opens up a poetic examination of the sociocultural forces that aim to reshape women
Translation rights: Rights: Dawid Skrabek, Piotr Pflegel; dawid.skrabek@literatura.wroclaw.pl, piotr.pflegel@literatura.wroclaw.pl
From the beginning, the work of Anna Adamowicz has centred on issues surrounding the medically understood human body. A close investigation of physiology often reveals, under her poetic microscope, both the internal visceral elements that align us with all living creatures and the external restrictions imposed by culture – especially on the female experience. In Break: The Spine of Titania Wing, the reader is invited into the operating room to bear witness to the realignment of Titania’s spine. Of course, the correction of her lumbar scoliosis also serves as a metaphor for other ways women are ‘straightened’.
Drawing on her own experience and invoking cultural figures who also suffered spinal limitations – such as Max Blecher, Frida Kahlo and Yennefer of Vengerberg from The Witcher – Adamowicz probes the incision where chronic pain, cultural correction, medical ritual, eroticism and transgression meet. The book itself becomes a site of suture, thanks to the stitch-like precision of the poems’ lineation and a collaboration with artist Marta Ignerska, who provides embroidered illustrations of recombined body parts done in black and blood-red thread. Break: The Spine of Titania Wing is at once an account of imposed normalisation and an embrace of curvature that gives us a sensory-rich look inside the human organism.
Mira Rosenthal
Selected samples
She climbed her first peaks in a headscarf at a time when women in the mountains were treated by climbers as an additional backpack. It was with her that female alpinism began! She gained recognition in a spectacular way. The path was considered a crossing for madmen. Especially since the tragic accident in 1929, preserved … Continue reading “Halina”
First, Marysia, a student of an exclusive private school in Warsaw’s Mokotów district, dies under the wheels of a train. Her teacher, Elżbieta, tries to find out what really happened. She starts a private investigation only soon to perish herself. But her body disappears, and the only people who have seen anything are Gniewomir, a … Continue reading “Wound”
A young girl, Regina Wieczorek, was found dead on the beach. She was nineteen years old and had no enemies. Fortunately, the culprit was quickly found. At least, that’s what the militia think. Meanwhile, one day in November, Jan Kowalski appears at the police station. He claims to have killed not only Regina but also … Continue reading “Penance”
The year is 1922. A dangerous time of breakthrough. In the Eastern Borderlands of the Republic of Poland, Bolshevik gangs sow terror, leaving behind the corpses of men and disgraced women. A ruthless secret intelligence race takes place between the Lviv-Warsaw-Free City of Gdańsk line. Lviv investigator Edward Popielski, called Łysy (“Hairless”), receives an offer … Continue reading “A Girl with Four Fingers”
This question is closely related to the next one, namely: if any goal exists, does life lead us to that goal in an orderly manner? In other words, is everything that happens to us just a set of chaotic events that, combined together, do not form a whole? To understand how the concept of providence … Continue reading “Order and Love”
The work of Józef Łobodowski (1909-1988) – a remarkable poet, prose writer, and translator, who spent most of his life in exile – is slowly being revived in Poland. Łobodowski’s brilliant three- volume novel, composed on an epic scale, concerns the fate of families and orphans unmoored by the Bolshevik Revolution and civil war and … Continue reading “Ukrainian Trilogy: Thickets, The Settlement, The Way Back”
