Special Operation

In Special Operation, Mark Pawlak bears witness to war with moral urgency and precision. Soldiers retrieve frost-covered bodies stacked in trenches "and we must remember to remain human." Blood pools on a sidewalk; cups of tea remain warm beside the dead. Each image strikes like a match in darkness, briefly illuminating how people endure, resist and continue to see. In a Brechtian spirit, these poems insist on truth stripped of consolation, asking readers not to look away but to reckon. Pawlak's compressed, lyrical lines cut through silence to reveal the costs of war--and the fragile, stubborn humanity still under fire.  --Dzvinia Orlowsky, author of  Those Absences Now Closest and Bad Harvest.

Mark Pawlak who bears the surname of a grandfather born in Lviv, is the author of ten poetry collections, most recently  Away Away (Arrowsmith Press, 2024), and the memoir My Deniversity: Knowing Denise Levertov (MadHat Press, 2021). His poems have been translated into German, Japanese, Polish and Spanish. and have been performed at Teatr Polski in Warsaw.  In English his poems and prose have appeared widely  in anthologies such as  The Best American Poetry, Blood to Remember: American Poets On the Holocaust, For The Time Being: The Bootstrap Anthology of Poetic Journals and in the literary magazines: New American Writing, Mother Jones, Poetry South, The Saint Ann's Review, and The World, among many others. He taught mathematics at the University of Massachusetts Boston (1979-2016), where he was Director of Academic Support  Programs and received the Chancellors Achievement Award. He lives in Cambridge.