Poetry

He debuted in 2008 with a collection called Světla mezi prkny. For his second book, A Trap for Brigita, he won the Magnesia Litera award for poetry in 2013. He was born in Uherské Hradiště in 1978, graduated from the post-secondary film school in Zlín and now works in the Municipal Library in Prague. Besides poetry, he also writes essays. He builds on the avant-garde of the First Czechoslovak Republic, particularly the legacy of surrealism that he brings up to date in an original way both through a distinctive vision of cinematic editing and through a captivating expression derived from the Apollinairian concept of a poem as an unbound ‘zone’. Brigita, the titular character of the book, is not only a specific girl, the poet’s lost lover, but also a common, slowly uncovered feminine principle. Řehák is a sensual poet, slightly erotic and also critical: “I know that it’s not possible to live here, my friends. / Where does your blissful Elsewhere sleep?”

Praise

“This is poetry which opens up gradually, which one enters into in a roundabout way. Poetry which knows how to snap its trap shut even when it is read repeatedly – and each time with the help of a different lure.”

— Markéta Kittlová, iLiteratura

“Řehák’s poetry is a gripping stream emanating from a confident poetic gesture through which the poet recasts raw ‘signs of the times’ into an unsettling and purely contemporary myth.”

— Magnesia Litera jury