Gutter BallAllie McKean Allie McKean is a poet in the MFA for Poets & Writers at The University of Massachusetts Amherst. She works for the Juniper Summer Writing Institute and teaches college composition. Her chapbook Gutter Ball (2024) is out from Distance No Object.

Ginczanka's surreal and mythologically-informed poetry appeared at a time in Poland when Jewish poets like Julian Tuwim were at the helm of the avant-garde in the Skamander poetic movement

available for the first time with a complete English translation

just verbal streetlife in the common wind repeating: wordtomydead

refraining from easy equivalences

with friends dead and parents dead and the ‘Harvard / avant / garde’ no substitute for anything

and contains an illuminating introduction by the editors

Starik ooit zei: ‘Jij dicht met een drumstel in je hoofd

the poem’s language is translingual

annihilation

This is a return of a political surrealism when its convulsive bloom is most needed

leerkracht

a series of poems which read as an attempt to speed-write the still-life image