Karolina Zapal - One of the most riveting, beautiful collections on immigration, meeting head-on the challenges of exploring the acceptance of difference, taking language and customs beyond borders and living with the cost of both in this world

Karolina Zapal, Polalka, Spuyten Duyvil, 2018.
karolinazapal.com/
an excerpt


Polalka brilliantly weaves the thread of experience and language together to create a new American flag, one made out of the torn fabric of immigrant dreams, American dislocations, lotteries, and language. With daring and wry wit, Karolina Zapal delivers a timely missive packed with an illuminating punch. - Brenda Coultas




When I first encountered Karolina Zapal's Polalka, I found some convenience in reading the text's arrangements, erasures, and estrangements as only performance--of the immigrant's crisis of assimilation, loss, and fear. I was wrong. This is, more importantly, also a text of pleasure, a site for "the possibility of a dialectics of desire, of an unpredictability of bliss," as Roland Barthes said. Karolina writes like an outsider who has won the lottery and ravaged the game. Polalka plays, pleases, and flirts. It is un-writing written "off-tune by off-breed who tells its holes." - J'Lyn Chapman


One of the most riveting, beautiful collections on immigration, meeting head-on the challenges of exploring the acceptance of difference, taking language and customs beyond borders and living with the cost of both in this world. Karolina Zapal's innovations with language and the page keep this text resonating in us, calling us to read it again, be with her journey again. One of my favorite new books, and I am certain it will be one of yours as well! - CAConrad

Poetry

“To Be Local,” “Customs,” & “Kraj” – Flock Issue 20 (2018)

“Darling” – The Dependent Issue #1: Intimacy (2018)

“Edging” – The Manhattanville Review (2017)

“Office: Parts 1 & 2” – Witness Vol. XXX.1 (2017) * Nominated for a Pushcart Prize XLIII

“Crossroads” – SWP Guerilla Lit Mag (2017) (collaboration with Ryan Mihaly)

“Living Room: Parts 1 & 2” – Bone Bouquet Issue 8.1 (2017)

“To the Lady Who Left the Note” – Indicia Volume 1.2 (2017)

“Język (sections II & III)” – Bombay Gin 43 (2017)

“A Love Letter to Zygmunt Hertz” – SWP Guerilla Lit Mag (2016)

“A Walk with the Seeing and the Blind,” “With Hands in His Lap,” & “Giving Voices to the Best Lines of Bad Poems” – The Birds We Piled Loosely Issue 6 (2016)

Essays

“Devil in White” – Sinkhole (2018) (runner up, Pop Culture Essay Contest)

“Ki$$ the President” – Foglifter Volume 2 Issue 1 (2017)

“Mała Means Little Feminine” – winner of John L. Rainey Prize, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (2015)

Translations

“Sky Writing” – 3:AM Magazine (forthcoming) (collaboration with Ryan Mihaly)

Book Reviews

Emiy Abendroth, ]Exclosures[ – Galatea Resurrects (2016)

Cody-Rose Clevidence, Beast Feast – Galatea Resurrects (2016)

Anselm Hollo, Seven – Something on Paper (2016)

Dao Strom, We Were Meant to Be a Gentle People – Something on Paper (2016)

J’Lyn Chapman, Beastlife – Something on Paper (2016)

Others

Round Table: Text and Image – Something on Paper (2017)

Co-editor of SWP Folio for Bombay Gin 44 (with Ryan Mihaly)

Interview with Julie Carr – Something on Paper (2016)

Karolina Zapal is an itinerant poet, essayist, and translator. Her work has appeared in The Manhattanville Review, Bone Bouquet, Foglifter, Witness, Bombay Gin, and others. She served as the Anselm Hollo Fellow at Naropa University from 2015-2017. She's an editor with The Birds We Piled Loosely Press and an appointed Bridge Guard in Štúrovo, Slovakia. Born in Poland and raised in the United States, she wonders about lost cities and impenetrable borders. This is her first book. Her website is karolinazapal.com.