Dana Gioia, US, September 2025

Krystyna Lenkowska’s Decompression is a book of existential paradox that celebrates both the ecstasy and entropy of life. Time, age, and mortality are her themes, but they are handled with delicate detachment and gentle irony. In Lenkowska’s poems the everyday world shimmers with intimations of infinity. Even her wordplay is revelatory: the flowers in a remembered garden are finally understood to be cosmos. If death occasionally peaks from the corner of a poem, he inspires no fear but joyful gratitude for “the noble and dear dust” of life. 

Dana Gioia, American poet, literary critic, literary translator, and essayist.