Wybór stand-upów

Smiling through tears, laughing at one’s own suffering – these are the first slogans that come to the mind of the reader of Justyna Bargielska’s new collection of verse, entitled

A Selection of Stand-ups. One comes away with the sensation of the poem being treated as a gag, a cabaret monologue, and it’s actually therapy, a manner of dealing with depression. The word “selection” also indicates that the author has chosen a particular strategy to speak of herself and the world, a manner of taking advantage of poetry in the ongoing process of the illness of life. In this sense, poetry helps her to endure while at the same time offering a pattern of endurance to others, showing how one can “bravely” deal with suffering, abandonment, loneliness. Most frequently, the lonely woman can’t handle things – and this constitutes the strength and truth of these poems. The reader soon begins to take her side, as he or she also sometimes feels helpless in the face of the unknown powers that decide his or her fate. Bargielska is familiar with that most oppressive power: the lack of love. With humour, she speaks of what it’s like when someone ceases to love you, refuses to acknowledge the time spent together, refuses to recognise children had together. And so such poems would never have arisen if not for the shock, the experience of abandonment. The narrative voice in these poems is disoriented, struggling to reorganise her life, to create some system that would bind together its senses and significances. The narrator laughs, and at the same time weeps. She reaches for psychotropic medicines, seeks healing through psychiatry, but even that is not capable of returning to her a sense of security. One reads this book with a lump in the throat, even though one’s lips again and again burst wide in laughter.