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Despite starting her new collection Play Camp with the momentous motto from Ezra Pound, which eloquently describes an attempt at resistance, Justyna Kulikowska’s poems don’t “seek praise”, they are far from posturing or showing off, instead they focus on the issue at hand and the style. The issue is not obvious – for some it might be freedom, for others – irony, for some others still – a game of quoting and referencing. Kulikowska has created a synthesis of these values, since by speaking about issues of social importance, of things that irritate her, she happily tries on and discards – not without irony – the forms she encountered in culture, in the “play camp” of poetic tradition. This time her poetry is less rebellious, has less fury, and more melancholy and regret. Which does not mean the poet has dropped the contesting element. Quite the opposite, she finds a new, local,

“Podlasie melody” for it. She uses its rhythms to talk about killed animals (for example, the chickens used for “Podlasie pâté”), about excluded existences, about women pushed aside to the margins of historical memory, about familiar nationalism and clericalism. The accusatory gist of the poems is highlighted and at the same time – paradoxically – softened by references to Pound, Auden and Williams. From this melting pot, in which she scathingly brings together the embarrassingly folksy with the glamorously European, is the source of a flow of verbal slime, lacking in self-confidence but still strong, even when the author doubts in causative power of yet another “scrappy attempt at description”.

However, the reader does not doubt, they let themselves be carried away by this “deceptive current” (similar to the current of the Narew River) of the poem, decidedly changing the perspective on the ambiguous, morally questionable modernity.