Astonishments: Selected Poems of Anna Kamienska - Paperback Edition

Kamienska came of age during the horrors of the Nazi occupation of Poland and lived under Communism. These experiences, as well as the sudden death of her husband, led her to engagement with the Bible and the great religious thinkers of the 20th century. Her poems record the struggles of a rational mind with religious faith, addressing loneliness and uncertainty in a remarkably direct, unsentimental manner. Her spiritual quest has resulted in extraordinary poems on Job, other biblical personalities, and victims of the Holocaust. Other poems explore the meaning of loss, grief, and human life. Still, her poetry expresses a fundamentally religious sense of gratitude for her own existence and that of other human beings, as well as for myriad creatures, such as hedgehogs, birds and "young leaves willing to open up to the sun."

Anna Kamienska (1920-1986) was a major Polish writer and a recognized peer of the Nobel Prize winners Wislawa Szymborska and Czeslaz Milosz. She left a rich legacy of twenty books of poetry, two volumes of Notebooks (a short-hand record of her readings and self-questioning), two volumes of commentaries on the Bible, and other writings and translations.

Grazyna Drabik is a translator of Polish poetry into English and Portuguese, with translations published in literary journals and anthologies in the U.S. and Brazil. She teaches literature at City College-CUNY.

David Curzon is the author of books of poetry and midrash, and the editor of two anthologies. His work is represented in two Oxford anthologies and in World Poetry. He is currently a contributing editor of The Forward and The Jerusalem Review.