MLB’s extraordinary linguistic awareness and amused wonderment with language lurk beneath all his poetry. One of the principal authors of the "bruLion" generation, which has been influenced by American poets such as Frank O’Hara, Allen Ginsberg, and John Ashbery, MLB has published six volumes of poetry and received numerous prestigious literary prizes. Three of his volumes were inspired by the avant-garde and surrealist traditions, and presented the reader with riddle-poems to solve. The work in this bilingual edition is from his 2006 volume, 69, which encompasses his poetic output from the fall of Communism to the present, allowing the reader to trace the process of personal and artistic development during the rapidly changing post-Communist years. 
 
MLB was born in 1967 in Slovenia, graduated with a degree in Geophysics at Krakow’s Academy of Mining and Metallurgy, and now divides his time between Krakow and the Middle East. In addition to his work as a geophysical engineer, he works on the editorial board of the quarterly, bruLion. English translations of his work have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Trafika, Chicago Review, Fence, Zoland Poetry, and the Zephyr Press anthology Carnivorous Boy Carnivorous Bird. (photo by Marta Eloy Cichocka)
 
Frank L. Vigoda’s translations, primarily from Polish, have appeared in a variety of publications, including Modern Poetry in Translation, Polin, Studies in Polish Jewry, Lyric Poetry Review, Chicago Review, Absinthe: New European Writing, Circumference, and Fence. Long-time translation projects include the work of Aleksander Wat, Rafal Wojaczek, Urke Nachalnik, and two young Polish poets, Marcin Jagodzinski and Kamil Zajac.