Words From Across the World

One of the pitfalls of editing a literary journal is that
out of the poets and writers you meet, 99 percent of
them spend 99 percent of their time whining about
their love lives. Eventually, the sensitivities are
blunted until you reach the point where you pull the
covers over your head at the slightest hint of another
human being's pain. Then you encounter a writer like
Paul Polansky. And God help you if you ignore him.

Mr. Polansky's stock-in-trade is genocide-specifically,
the fight against the systematic efforts to exterminate
the Roma (also known as Gypsies) in Eastern Europe.
In his poetry collections Living Through It Twice, The
River Killed My Brother, and Not a Refugee, Mr.
Polansky carefully delineates the atrocities of Czechs,
Slovaks, Albanians, and others (even NATO and the
UN are not innocent here) against the Roma. "Art" is
tossed to the winds -- don't look for the little niceties
such as form, meter, or rhyme in these poems. What
remains is the raw power of the darker side of the
human psyche -- fear, hatred, grief, loss, violence,
torture, and an ever-dimming hope of compassion
and rescue. But perhaps that was the point of "Art" in
the first place.

Mr. Polansky is a native of Mason City, Iowa. In his
undergraduate days, Mr. Polansky opted to spend his
junior year at Madrid University, which became the
beginning of a lifetime odyssey through Europe, an
odyssey which led him to become one of the most
sought-after writer-lecturers concerning Eastern
European human rights issues for our time. His other
books include The Storm, a novel; Stray Dog (Poems
of a Fighting Freak), a paeon to, or rather against,
the violence in boxing; and Black Silence and The
Gypsies of Kosovo (non-fiction).

Paul Polansky's writings have a way of waking you up
at 3 a.m. in a cold sweat. They can also reawaken the
most dormant social conscience. So don't say I didn't
warn you.

www.PaulPolansky.com