zna swoje miejsce

Kasper Pfeifer’s he knows his place takes up questions of individual dreams and collective identity. It shines a light on powerful cabals bent on gatekeeping as well as outsider efforts to storm the Bastilles of language and power. Central here are the allegorical figures of dog and master, which reviewer Anna Kałuża sees as locked in hierarchies that are ‘economic, class-based, racialised and species-oriented’. Pfeifer’s dog sometimes resists what has been designated as his ‘place’ – in one poem he tells us, ‘they say I lack manners when I bark’ – and sometimes gives into the arbitrary whims of the master. Kałuża writes that Pfeifer ‘creates his own topography’, his ‘lyrical metronome becoming a kind of buffer against the language of violence, the language of menace, the language of terror’. The poems seek to imagine a ‘pack’ (sfora), a collective of potential camaraderie and resistance. Simultaneously, they themselves constitute a kind of pack, building meaning in conversation with each other, their words taking on additional resonances with each repetition.