“I wish you were here,” says the speaker of Tomasz Różycki’s poetry collection (Archipelago Books, November 2023), translated from the Polish by poet Mira Rosenthal. This phrase recurs throughout the book, addressing many figures—a lover, the self, a god, an absent hero—as the speaker seeks to make sense of the despair and communal losses weathered by eastern Europeans during the past century. Różycki wrote the book in 2015, when Poland’s right-wing populist political party won a majority in Parliament; Rosenthal committed to translating the book
