Anna Kamienska

“I’ve learned to value failed conversations, missed connections, confusions. What remains is what’s unsaid, what’s underneath. Understanding on another level of being.”

“I returnedto confirmthere can be no return.”

“No home anymore. Nowhere to return. My house is a ruin, a cemetery. You may yearn for the grave, but just try living there.”

“Letters of the condemned. Last words scratched on a cell’s wall. To write like that.”

“Where your pain is, there your heart lies also.”

“The way a source strains toward the light, toward the air. Its laboring work, its effort, its black passageways like despair. That’s the way a poet looks for words. With muscles, gestures.”

“My poems are more my silence than my speech. Just as music is a kind of quiet. Sounds are needed only to unveil the various layers of silence.”

“I don’t write poetry when I wish, I write when I can’t, when my larynx is flooded and my throat is shut.”

“Tell me what’s the differencebetween hope and waitingbecause my heart doesn’t knowIt constantly cuts itself on the glass of waitingIt constantly gets lost in the fog of hope”

“I write in order to comprehend, not to express myself.”

“Poetry is a presentiment of the truth.”