Dr. Andrew Zawacki publishes photo-poetry book

ENDSCAPE blends thirty photographs with twenty poems in the inaugural P5 photo/poetry

“There is no landscape that is not obscure underneath its pleasing transparencies, if you speak to it endlessly,” wrote Édouard Glissant. Andrew Zawacki grew up in northwestern Pennsylvania, where the geography—mountains, woodlands, reservoirs, fields, but also shuttered steel mills and hydro-electric dams—exerted a heavy influence on his developing sense of language, art, and history.

Now, even after two decades living in the American South, he still feels like he’s trespassing and eavesdropping, never at home. The photographs in Endscape try to revive the clandestine obscurity of these unfamiliar landscapes, listening hard for grace notes as we confront the drawing down of the earth as we know it. The deceptive beauty of this place is seductive and abject at once—and natural beauty is little other than history failing to unfold. If that past is rarely evident, it can be heard, faintly, filthily. There are haints at large at the forest edge, who bear with them a violence and a voice. In the aftermath, these images frisk for a human trace on the earthbound Georgia air.

Zawacki’s interlaced poems also track an itinerary over the Dixie countryside. While oblique in its own fashion, however, the writing speaks more explicitly of its author’s experience as a citizen laboring under the convening pressures of climate collapse, forever war, acute political distress, and the directives of global capital run amok. Part of a longer, ongoing project, this lyric series is meant to suggest an ‘afterpastoral,’ in which our once coherent exchange with the world has glitched into virtual spectacle and antagonisms accruing from technology, uneven market forces, and the fracturing of social life.

English Department Head Roland Végső adds, 

“Andrew Zawacki’s work stands out for its rare fusion of theoretical rigor and sensory immediacy, bringing poetry, translation, and image into striking conversation. His writing is marked by a precision that charts new pathways through language and perception. Across genres, Zawacki continually expands the possibilities of form, offering readers work that is adventurous, deeply felt, and unmistakably his own.”

Photoworks UK is a registered charity organization supported by public funding through Arts Council England’s National Portfolio. They are driven to bringing new experiences to audiences and opening up new ways to encounter photography. P5 is the photography and poetry pamphlet series directed by Photoworks in partnership with David Solo, and designed by Jane & Jeremy. Photography and poetry have been in dialogue since the earliest days of the camera. The space between these forms invites layered meaning, unexpected emotion, and new ways of seeing.  

Endscape is available for purchase from Photoworks UK: https://photoworks.org.uk/shop/p5-andrew-zawacki/

Andrew Zawacki is an American poet, critic, editor, translator, and a Distinguished Research Professor with the Creative Writing Program at the University of Georgia.