In 2021, Małgorzata Lebda ran the entire length of the longest river in Poland, the Vistula, from its source in the Beskid Mountains to its mouth at the Baltic Sea – a distance of 1,113 kilometres. She set out to run as a poet, not as an athlete, to use the rhythms of her own body as a means of understanding and connecting to the rhythms of the river’s body of water, under threat of environmental ruin. Mer de Glace, which won the Szymborska Award, is the introduction to her remarkable journey. A profound meditation on the porosity, reactivity and receptivity of both the body and the natural world, the collection reveals their deep interdependence.
Mer de Glace by Małgorzata Lebda, translated by Mira Rosenthal
Fitzcarraldo Editions
Published 21st May 2026
‘Małgorzata Lebda’s poetry never ceases to amaze the reader. Even a chance encounter with it imperceptibly creates an everlasting connection. As eternal as the bond between the frozen sea and the forest.’
— Olga Tokarczuk, author of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
‘What does a poet see when she runs along an entire river? In Mer de Glace, Małgorzata Lebda presents poems of extraordinary attentiveness to sensory experience, finding in tiny details such as the closing of an eyelid or the flesh of a greengage plum the same life force that courses beneath the glacier of the book’s title. Dense and luminous, these poetic missives from a body in motion amount to a radical act of presence that runs along the nerve between the intimate and the immense – rooted in landscape, language, and the rhythm of one foot placed in front of another.’
— Scotia Gilroy, writer and translator
‘“It’s the job of the senses to turn into words”, writes Małgorzata Lebda in “Geography”. Her poems operate like a dog’s sense of smell in darkness: they venture forth with a clarity heightened by a tender knowledge of the embodied quality of all things – human, animal, celestial, natural, unnatural and linguistic. From a culture with an unparalleled tradition of poetry, Lebda is another truly fine poet from Poland. Her poetic vision is so singular and her style so distinctive we already have in usage the term “Lebda-esque”.’
— Alice Lyons, author of Oona
‘Małgorzata Lebda’s startling Mer de Glace – so necessary for our ecological moment – connects the body to landscapes, reviving that ancient intimacy through language fertile as black soil, bright as sun on glacial ice, and urgent as a dog’s moonlit howl.’
— Michael Downs, author of The Greatest Show: Stories
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