“Word, birch bark”: Does Piotr Janicki’s [Dog’s Book] Need an Ecocriticism (and Vce Versa)?

The article presents the work of Piotr Janicki, one of the most interesting Polish poets of the middle generation (born 1974). The author focuses primarily on the 2018 untitled volume of poems, referred to as [A Dog’s Book], in order to recreate the structure of the subject it contains, using the categories offered by the ecocritical discourse, represented by the works of Anna Ubertowska, Rosi Braidotti, Timothy Morton and other. In the course of the analysis, it turns out that an important assumption of Janicki’s poetry is the desire to break the anthropocentric perspective, which would place his work in the trend of “deeply ecological” literature, the task of which is, inter alia, to “infect” readers with new forms of sensitivity and imagination, breaking with the traditionally understood humanism, which places man above non-human beings, and not in a network of relationships with them, as it happens in [The Dog’s Book].

The article presents the work of Piotr Janicki, one of the most interesting Polish poets of the middle generation (born 1974). The author focuses primarily on the 2018 untitled volume of poems, referred to as [A Dog’s Book], in order to recreate the structure of the subject it contains, using the categories offered by the ecocritical discourse, represented by the works of Anna Ubertowska, Rosi Braidotti, Timothy Morton and other. In the course of the analysis, it turns out that an important assumption of Janicki’s poetry is the desire to break the anthropocentric perspective, which would place his work in the trend of “deeply ecological” literature, the task of which is, inter alia, to “infect” readers with new forms of sensitivity and imagination, breaking with the traditionally understood humanism, which places man above non-human beings, and not in a network of relationships with them, as it happens in [The Dog’s Book].