"Edytta Wojnar’s poems throb with surprises. We find here evanescent desires, personal and communal losses, and heart-felt melancholia for the left-behind country and native tongue. But there is also sheer playfulness of language (or rather languages as Wojnar occasionally interweaves her lyrics with her native Polish words), which does not describe but acts and reenacts. These poems walk on their eyelashes and they click clack. In Wojnar’s landscapes we walk among snowflakes as fireflies, and women are fog carved in cedar. Her poems hum the melodies of magic and mysteries. Curses turn into prayers. Foreign sounds on linked strands roll into the inked lines. These poems are both profound and sheer delight." ~Ewa Chrusciel
"Everywhere nowadays, immigration is often billed as a kind of national threat, even a catastrophe. Death by cruel abstraction. More than ever, what is human(e) resides in those concrete particulars overlooked, multilingual sensitivities, the ability to perceive “lions” in “dandelions” and the pregnant third spaces between words, languages, geographies. Reading Wojnar reminds me how language continues to evolve, how in the poet's hands, languages like Polish and English can be worked together into a polish to transform the furniture of our everyday lives, these capacious poems buffered to a brilliant shine." ~Timothy Liu
"The poems of Edytta Wojnar’s Dandelions in Third Space are deeply scored with a clear-eyed tenderness and a sharp poetics. This book is rich with poems finely wrought and wise about the immigrant experience, family, the visions we have of home and new lands. Wojnar’s poems shine with gorgeousness and grit, showing us the “delicate rules / of declension & family / expectations behind the borders.” This is a very fine book." ~Christopher Salerno
"The red rain in Edytta Wojnar’s new collection of poems appears in various guises: as the droplet of blood loosed by a slapped mosquito, as the raspberry-tinged Pellegrino that spills onto shorts, as flashing ambulance lights during the pandemic, as a miscarriage. Underscoring these poems’ often lush surfaces is a troubled marriage and the violence, both random and political, perpetrated against women. “Churchless” and sleepless, Wojnar still insists that “no psalm praises life // fuller than a chorus of wrens / on a spring morning.” Such joyful noise, such poetry, offers solace to us all." —Michael Waters
"Although the poems in Red Rain gaze unflinchingly into what Yeats called the foul rag and bone shop of the heart, they also manage, again and again, the lovely, crucial miracle of finding hope. There is a beguiling music in Wojnar’s work that draws us into understanding the wonderful ambiguities of living life most fully." —George Bilgere
Red Rain holds us within spaces of in-betweenness where wounds and provisional delights tug at each other. Discreet in their vocabularies of sorrow and luminous in articulation, Edytta Wojnar’s poems move through sites of ambivalence, betrayal, disguise, silences and door thuds, but also lean into the night to listen how “rain plays cymbals on copper sills” or to watch “a bluebird fold its wings.” Pandemic, marriage, intimacy are tested for what they might reveal about resilience and the gift of being. How fortunate still, they seem to whisper, to have the tools and rituals of poetry join “the chorus of wrens” and the “wisps of clouds” to seek what sustains and consoles us. —Mihaela Moscaliuc
Red Rain is superbly crafted and utterly original. It’s not just a chapbook of powerful vignettes…it’s a manifesto on power from a woman refusing the violences and silences thrust upon her. With an unflinching gaze, Wojnar chronicles childhood rape, marital betrayal, and how it affects how she moves through the world. At the same time, she lifts up her hopes of what will be different for her daughter in moments of vivid beauty and tenderness. This is a book from a poet who believes there’s still time for a different story for women, including herself. —Emily Sernaker
A series of violations haunts Red Rain: A childhood rape, the woman’s concern for her own violated daughter, the Covid pandemic which forces people into isolation and fear as well as entrapment with their intimate partners. How revealing, yet surprising, are the poet’s metaphors as these about her husband: —"your body / a crossbow / a rainbow—i can’t decide,” Is it a weapon, dangerous, or a rainbow, insubstantial but visible, beautiful, promising? Finally, the tension between her and her husband culminates when she finds “a single zirconia / stud you won’t recognize…/ waiting between the sheets.” But there is a toughness here, as when in “Me too” she promises her daughter, “you will be unbreakable.” What keeps the poet afloat is faith, not religious faith, but faith in the small miracles of the world and in her own pursuit of language strong and agile enough to encompass these experiences. With “bluebirds [which] bring a message / of hope,” even though one “mistook glass for air // my home for heaven.” Like Emily Dickinson, Wojnar “dwell[s]in possibility,” sometimes ambiguous, tentative, but often daring. —Mary Makofske
"Wojnar’s poems, echoing with heartbreak, displacement, and, surprisingly, humor, rise like a cathedral above the clutter of contemporary culture, bearing witness to the terrible lessons of history—and the enduring strength of the human spirit." ~George Bilgere
"Wojnar takes on huge changes—continents and cultures, the present and the past, tensions enacted with perfection in her lines, “Warm wind carrying radiation/sneaked into homes/through windows left ajar./Spring was in the air.” And yet an enormous sense of peacefulness and moments of precise vision underlie it all. Listen: “A Common Loon,” she says, “lands on the Moon’s / Reflection.” “The moon gives gold light to everything I touch” –and it’s true. Her generosity of vision and spirit is on every page." ~Renee Ashley
"Stories Her Hands Tell is dense with rich language—very specific with strong sensuous imagery and unique metaphors—which, in varied lyrical explorations, weaves a dramatic narrative tapestry of her relationships." ~Stanley H. Barkan