Meet the author: Dominika Wrozynski

You are invited to a meeting with Dominika Wrozynski

Wednesday, May 29th, 7pm
Polish Cultural Center

Free Admission. All welcome.

Dominika Wrozynski is an assistant professor of English at Manhattan College in New York City, where she also co-directs the college’s Major Author Reading Series (MARS). Her poems have appeared in journals such as Crab Orchard Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Rattle, Five Points, Nimrod, Birmingham Poetry Review, New Madrid, and others. She lives in Patterson, New York.

Dominika Wrozynski’s American Accent is a gorgeous discovery of riches, personal in its moving narratives of love and loss, cosmopolitan in sensibility and range. An opening sequence that explores inherited trauma (Wrozynski’s Polish mother was maimed during WWII) is riveting, and as a whole, the volume adroitly balances the darker moments (the veteran who cannot forget the “charred bodies” he saw in Kuwait) with the wondrous (Patrick Swayze in New Mexico in a balloon!). American Accent comprises a work of lyric witness in poetry redolent with humane truths and beauty. That’s all you need to know.  –Cynthia Hogue, author of In June the Labyrinth.

What makes us Americans? Dominika Wrozynski’s poems say Everything! She has traveled from Poland to Seattle to New Mexico to Las Vegas to Florida, seen movie stars and felt the heat of deserts and swamps. These poems are full of wasp stings and hornets, Polish vodka, and everyday worship of the luminous ordinary and a paean to the “howling, slobbering parts” of her heart. Not only does she dive deep into her own being but she tells us what it means to live in this country with its crazy rhythms. A glorious debut.  –Barbara Hamby, author of Bird Odyssey 

The poems in this breathtaking debut collection ricochet from the startling (the poet’s Polish mother has only one arm, “the other shot away by a German soldier / during World War II”) to the tedious (stalled cars, bad dogs, worse jobs). All of America is here, and we see it all bathed in love’s abundance, the great and the terrible celebrated equally. For it is everything—the good, the bad, the ho-hum—that gives us our lives, this poet, these marvelous poems.  –David Kirby, author of Get Up, Please .