Co kradnie złodziej wołający ratunku

Being an outsider while still part of society is a poetic trope as old as poetry itself, or at least since the 19th century. What makes Adam Kaczanowski’s What a Thief Crying for Help Steals distinctive and appealing, however, is that the poetic subject experiences estrangement not just from society, but also from his own life choices. There is a fundamental scepticism not only about what the world has to offer, but how the self has come to terms with it. It is no surprise, then, that the thief also appears as ‘[a]n astronaut dressed as an alien / because something’s not sitting right with him’. Leaving Earth behind, the astronaut returns ‘dressed as an alien’. Alienation literally manifests in alien imagery, including ‘designer alienwear’ later in the poem.

Kaczanowski’s poetic subject confronts estrangement in yet another way: through the death of Aaron Carter. The collection opens with a section titled: ‘Aaron Carter Is Dead, / Meanwhile’. Aaron Carter – an American popstar who came to fame in the late 1990s and died in 2022 at the age of 34 while struggling with mental illness – becomes a symbol of a prematurely ended era. Carter’s exit from the world mirrors the thief ’s own titular cry for help, a plea for extraterrestrial intervention, while haunted by the sense of having stolen something only to forget what it was and where it is hidden.