Building the Barricade

Swir’s searing first-person poetic account of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, translated by Piotr Florczyk with an introduction by Eavan Boland.

Why This One

If you come to Swir through Talking to My Body and want to go deeper into her war poetry, this is the next step. Where Talking to My Body gives you the full range of her work, Building the Barricade focuses entirely on the Warsaw Uprising, the sixty-three-day battle that destroyed over sixty percent of the Polish capital and killed more than a hundred thousand civilians.

Swir served as a military nurse during the Uprising, and these poems are her witness testimony. They are written in short, declarative lines, almost like dispatches, capturing moments of terror, absurdity, and unexpected tenderness amid the destruction. The Tavern Books edition, translated by Florczyk, is the most complete English version, with a bilingual Polish-English text.

What to Expect

Brief, intense poems that read like fragments pulled from the rubble. Swir does not narrate the Uprising as history. She records it as a series of physical experiences: carrying bodies, building barricades from furniture, watching a building collapse. The tone is matter-of-fact, which makes the horror sharper. This is a longer book than Talking to My Body, but the poems themselves are short and the reading goes quickly.