To The Letter Av Tomasz Rozycki, Mira Rosenthal

Rozycki collects moments of illumination - a cat dashing out of a window and ''feral sun'' streaking in, a body planting itself in the ground like rhubarb and flowering. He collects and collects, opens a crack, and clutches a shrapnel of epiphany. Tomasz Rozycki''s To the Letter follows Lieutenant Anielewicz on the hunt for any clues that might lead 21st century human beings out of a sense of despair. With authoritarianism rising across Eastern Europe, the Lieutenant longs for a secret hero. At first, he suspects some hidden mechanism afoot: fruit tutors him in the ways of colour, he drifts out to sea to study the grammar of tides, or he gazes at the sun as it thrums away like a timepiece. In one poem, he admits ''this is the story of my confusion,'' and in the next the Lieutenant is back on the trail. ''This lunacy needs a full investigation,'' he jibes. He wants to get to the bottom of it all, but he''s often bewitched by letters and the trickery of language. Diacritics on Polish words form