Barbara Klicka was born in Płock in 1981, where she made her debut in 2000 with the volume. She is currently living in Warsaw.
Apart from her poetry, Barbara worked as an editor for Cwiszn, a Jewish quarterly about literature and art. She also was a co-author of lyrics and a member of the band Pochwalone on the album Czarny war. Her second volume of poetry was published 12 years later. Titled Same Same (Mikołów 2012), it attracted the attention of literary critics and the jury of the Wrocław ‘Silesius’ Poetry Award 2013 as it got nominated it in the ‘Book of the Year’ category. The poet had been noticed before, by the Biuro Literackie in Wrocław and invited, as one of the more interesting talents, to take part in the project ‘Odsiecz’ (Succour), whose title signalled the generational change. In 2015, Klicka published another poetry collection called Nice (Poznan 2015), which won the Wrocław’s ‘Silesius’ Poetry Award in 2016 as well as the prestigious Gdynia Literary Prize.
FILLING IT UP It takes us – the time between.
In the dream there was a banquet and leather – the string in the shoulders gave out no sound, the asphalt hadn’t dried out yet, the cake clung to the fingers, the icing sugar to the chin. You had naked breasts and a tangled tongue in the middle of the do,ტ
you danced, but afternoons are for the family. Tribute not fox trot – who- ever doesn’t know that dies or suffers. So your heart full of aspen pins, so your head under the faucet, knees under the chin. And what would happen
if you could see more, if it was brighter. And so: flounder and visit parks, in cloudily-lit afternoons embroider peaces on others’ frames, gather air in the lungs of the vacuum and take off the example. So:
fill up the time between as tight as can be, so it doesn’t grab you. And if it grabs you – drown.
Translated from Polish by David Malcolm