This collection by Petr Hruška is full of restlessness, yet its attention does not flit about. On the contrary. This is a slow kind of disquiet: it has its heft and its edges. It grows heavy, it jars, it gets under the skin. Life’s journey is past the midway point; important realisations, actions, twists, turns, and mistakes are behind us, but the world and life keep pressing upon us. Yet even this pressure grows old, heavy, and edgy—it is so familiar, and yet sometimes impossible to comprehend.

Do we still understand ourselves, our language, each other—or at least, even slightly, ourselves? Or have we been affected by a strange kind of muteness, like the things, the city, and the whole world around us? Have we become unable to utter a sensible word, a sentence? The edges of the world grow rough and chipped, thumbed beyond recognition. Somehow, however, we must get by. In this city called Ostrava, we need to make our own mournful, stubborn fuel to survive. In this ungainly, arduous night, while decent folk sleep through disaster, the poet is besieged by his insomnia. Somebody has to keep watch until the end. – Jan Štolba

Published in 2013 by Host Publishers in the Czech Republic.
60 pages / 15 x 18 cm

What exactly happened to that door which always used to close “by itself” and is suddenly left wide open? Or is it not the door at all, but the wind, humidity, heat, cold? Something must have happened. Something in the world has shifted. For some people, the door just needs to be slammed shut, thus putting right a slight mishap of the kind which, for reasons known only to God, happens a hundred times a day. It is undoubtedly possible to overlook such things, to pass them by without seeing, without stopping, without surprise. Petr Hruška’s poem, however, is the unexpected opening of a door into a world we know intimately, and yet we stand before it in astonishment. In fact, nothing has changed here; everything has just become real. – Jan Balabán

The poem “The Door,” translated by Jonathan Bolton, was featured in B O D Y.

Published in 2002 by Host Publishers in the Czech Republic.
56 pages / 11,5 x 17,5 cm

Petr Hruška has been widely considered as one of the most important Czech poets with his poems based on focused observation. But his latest book, I Caught Sight of My Face, has really taken readers’ breath away. The theme of the collection is not the present, but rather the past. And lyricism here is replaced by epic, and not just any epic: the poetic cycle draws on The First Voyage around the World, written exactly five hundred years earlier for the imperial court by Antonio Pigafetta, one of the participants in Ferdinand Magellan’s voyage of discovery. However, the reader should not expect a glorious saga of human heroism and conquest. In fact, it is quite the opposite: Hruška adopted the fictional perspective of a Venetian adventurer to show that human behaviour has not changed in half a millennium. Man remains an anxious, insecure, sometimes cowardly, evil, xenophobic and violent being. It is an easy-to-read, uncomplicated, yet at the same time deeply profound book.

Published in 2022 by Host Publishers in the Czech Republic.
70 pages / 13,4 x 21 cm