User’s Manual by Jirí Kolár and translated by Ryan Scott

This is poetry from Czech Republic.

User’s Manual by Jirí Kolár translated by Ryan Scott is published by Twisted Spoon Press. This is a Book originally written in Czech. This was published in 2019.0 and has the ISBN of 9.788086264547E12.

User’s Manual, by Jirí Kolár, is a Czech poetry collection from Czech Republic, translated from Czech by Ryan Scott, published by Twisted Spoon Press in 2019. It is a Czech collection by Jiří Kolář, translated by Ryan Scott, that makes instruction itself into a poetic object. The title is funny and exacting, inviting readers to ask whether a life, a poem, or a damaged century could ever come with usable directions. I would not approach it as a book that needs to be solved before it can begin working. Start with the title, the pressure of the translated line, and the feeling of a voice making room for itself in English. The value here is not just metadata or representation. It is the chance to let a particular book create its own weather, its own difficulty, and its own way of asking the reader to listen.

If you’d like to see international poetry continue and gain traction, consider requesting this work from your local library, or purchasing it from places like Open Books (a poetry only bookstore), Asterism Books (an independent press distributor), or bookshop.org to connect you with your local bookstores.

Check out more of the always in-progress translated poetry index here.