I multiplied letters like water
Poetry Talk with Stanisław Kalina Jaglarz

Reading
Talk
Poesiefestival Berlin 2026
Atelierraum, silent green
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© Michal Korta

Stanisław Kalina Jaglarz (born 1991 in Katowice) is the rising star of Polish poetry and one of the most important queer voices in the country. He has published two poetry collections: gościć sójki (roughly: “hosting jays,” 2022) and zajęczy żar (roughly: “hare’s glow,” 2024).

With his debut, he was nominated for the prestigious Silesius Prize, and he appeared twice (2023 and 2025) on the shortlist of the even more prestigious Wisława Szymborska Prize. His second volume, which is at once a love song, hymn of praise, and lament, received the Orpheus Prize for the best poetry collection.

According to his own statements, Jaglarz draws his writing impulses from tectonic movements and the cacophony of multiple identities (which is also significantly connected to his experiences as a trans person in Poland). His work is shaped by an idea of radical hospitality. It is situated within ecocritical discourses of the post-Anthropocene, in which the formerly absolute human subject is replaced by a relational network between humans, animals, and nature. Jaglarz says he draws from the sources of the atomic structures that constitute reality—the matter from which everything around us is made. Animals play a particularly important role here, such as a Steller’s sea cow grazing in warm depths or dogs driven out of villages, panting by the roadside. In one of his poems he writes: “I want to see / what the horseflies see, hovering watchfully above me, so close.” In another: “Will supple animals come to our aid, / believing in better gods, without crown or sceptre?”

Jaglarz evokes the utopia of a possible encounter in a “silence that means adventure or love / or other words unknown to human language.” In this poetry conversation, Jaglarz will also read from previously unpublished poems—texts about an anger-stroked emptiness, spoken from an “inflicted wound,” and texts about the time of transition: “when I gave myself a name like a desperate Adam, I discovered the correlation of words and the ability of letters to bind themselves into corals.”

Die Gedichte der Veranstaltung wurden eigens für das Poesiefestival Berlin übersetzt.

Stanisław Kalina Jaglarz in conversation with Anna Julian Mendlik

The event will be interpreted Polish-German.

Funded by: Polnisches Institut Berlin