Echoes of Tattered Tongues: Memory Unfolded

My Parents' Experiences as Polish Slave Laborers in Nazi Germany and Displaced Persons after the War

Friday, January 24, 2020

My Mother and the Wolves

Friday poem: My mother grew up in a forest in Eastern Poland. She could hear wolves howling in the winter, and she listened to her mother...

Thursday, January 23, 2020

No WiFi!

No WiFi! It was one of those things. My WiFi was working perfectly. I was watching a YouTube on my TV of a yoga instructor named Adrienn...

Saturday, January 4, 2020

Stop the Presses

Stop the Presses! True Confessions for some reason is selling for less than half price on Amazon. That’s $5.33 a copy with free shipping!...

Monday, December 30, 2019

Christmas Letter 2019

Christmas Letter, 2019 Dear Friends, For a long time, I wrote a Christmas Letter every year telling my friends and family membe...

Thursday, November 28, 2019

My Mom and Thanksgiving

Here’s my latest column for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy. As always feel free to drop a comment at the paper at the link below. MY MOM AND THAN...

Monday, October 21, 2019

Olga Tokarczuk and the Nobel Prize for Literature

Here’s my latest column for the Chicago Dziennik Zwiazkowy, the oldest Polish newspaper in America. Whether you like what I say or hate ...

Monday, October 14, 2019

Why I Never Worked in a Factory

Here’s my latest column for Chicago’s Polish Daily News. Please leave a comment at the paper, linked below. WHY I NEVER WORKED IN A FAC...

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About Me

John Guzlowski: I was born in a refugee camp in Germany after World War II, and came with my parents Jan and Tekla and my sister Donna to the United States as Displaced Persons in 1951. My Polish Catholic parents had been slave laborers in Nazi Germany. Growing up in the immigrant and DP neighborhoods around Humboldt Park in Chicago, I met Jewish hardware store clerks with Auschwitz tattoos on their wrists, Polish cavalry officers who still mourned for their dead horses, and women who walked from Siberia to Iran to escape the Russians. My poems try to remember them and their voices. These poems have appeared in my chapbook Language of Mules and in both editions of Charles Fishman’s anthology of American poets on the Holocaust, Blood to Remember. Since retiring from teaching American Literature in 2005, I've written two new books about my parents. My new poems about them appear in my books Echoes of Tattered Tongues (Aquila Polonica, 2017) and True Confessions (Darkhouse Books, 2019).

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