Kisses

The Polish Sappho — Named by Julian Tuwim
A Pioneer of Female Voice in Polish Interwar Poetry
Celebrated by Czesław Miłosz as Extraordinarily Modern
Honored by the Polish Senate with a Dedicated Year in 2025

Four lines. A whisper. The force of an entire love novel.

Published in 1926, Kisses became one of the most remarkable poetry collections of the Polish interwar period — modest in size, immense in its influence. Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska composed chiefly four-line miniatures, proving that a few simple sentences can carry the weight of an entire lifetime of longing. Critics repeatedly compared her style to Japanese haiku — restrained, intimate, and painful precisely because of its simplicity.

What Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska constructed was not merely a love collection. It was an anatomy of female desire spoken in its own language: longing, unfulfillment, jealousy, and the small cruelties of everyday life — rendered with such lightness that her poetry began to resemble a whisper rather than a literary recitation. Love in these poems was not an abstract ideal, but a bodily, fragile, and often merciless experience. She did not declaim. She confided. And that is precisely why the words cut so deep.

"After all, you love me more than life? You said so yourself last year…" —Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska, from the poem Love

The reverberations of Kisses have never stopped. Across generations, her poems were brought to life by Ewa Demarczyk in legendary interpretations set to music by Zygmunt Konieczny, by Czesław Niemen, Grzegorz Turnau, Krystyna Janda, and Kayah. In 2023, sanah brought Kisses back to the charts and to social media — performing alongside Katarzyna Nosowska and archival recordings of the poet's own voice, making poetry written nearly a century ago trend across platforms. In 2025, the Senate of the Republic of Poland established the Year of Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska, confirming that the poet who wrote quietly and briefly became one of the most enduring voices of 20th-century Polish literature.

Kisses is a collection you can read in a single sitting. Its last line will follow you for years.