Swallowing Mercury

“I really loved this strange book, which is sometimes sinister & sometimes lovely, & many other things besides.”— Evie Wyld, author of All the Birds, Singing

"Warm, subversively funny & elegiac for a lost rural life but unflinching in its depiction of the darker strands of Polish society, Swallowing Mercury is constructed around a spine of resistance & individuality."— Times Literary Supplement

“Swallowing Mercury is both magical & sinister, a memoir & a fairytale and, like Wiola, completely captivating.”— The Irish News

°°°

In vivid prose filled with texture, colour & sound, Wioletta Greg describes an ordinary adult world encroaching on a child’s extraordinary universe

Translated by Eliza Marciniak

In a close-knit Polish farming community in the 1980s, Wiola is growing up. She is a good Catholic girl brought up with fables and nurtured on superstition. She knows killing spiders brings on storms, & that she must never enter the seamstresses’ ‘secret’ room. Her father was a deserter but now he is a taxidermist. Wiola collects matchbox labels - & dances to the strange music of her own imagination.

°°°

In this celebrated debut from prize-winning poet Wioletta Greg, Wiola looks back on her youth in a close-knit, agricultural community in 1980s Poland. Her memories are precise, intense, distinctive, sensual: a playfulness & whimsy rise up in the gossip of the village women, rumored visits from the Pope, & the locked room in the dressmaker's house, while political unrest & predatory men cast shadows across this bright portrait. In prose that sparkles with a poet’s touch, Wioletta Greg's debut animates the strange wonders of growing up.

°°°

Wioletta Gregis the author of 6 volumes of poetry & a novella, Swallowing Mercury.  Her poetry collection, Finite Formulae & Theories of Chance, was shortlisted for the 2015 Griffin Poetry Prize. She was born in Kozieglowy, Poland in February 1974. She lives in Essex.