Anger and observation combine with a touch of bravado to produce one of the most explosive Czech poetry collections of recent years.

Poetry

It’s not often that an author brings out three collections at once. Kamil Bouška has managed to assemble three new poetry collections into a single unit whose ingenious graphic design makes it look like an impersonal folder for storing documents and files. The collections My Country, Document and For Life are Bouška’s report on the world we are living in today – or rather which is being lived in our social networks, relationships and dehumanized rituals.

This is nervy poetry, furiously snapping at everything around it, but it is also filled with a specific form of humour that is sometimes strangely affectionate, though still very dark and quirky. Bouška presents an ironic view of a dehumanized world which increasingly started to believe disinformation during the pandemic. Similarly, the poet parodies the infantilization of humanity. A poem will touch on the author’s private life, only for some absurdity to shatter the sense of intimacy in the very next line. This is laughter through the tears: in Bouška’s work, the greatest absurdities and collocations have a basis in the real world.

Kamil Bouška (1979) is a Czech poet based in Prague. His collections Oheň po slavnosti (A Fire After a Party, 2011) and Inventura (Inventory, 2018) were nominated for the most prestigious Czech annual literary prize, the Magnesia Litera Award. English translations of his poems have been widely published in literary magazines in the United States and elsewhere.