In 2021, Malgorzata 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. 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. Her collection Mer de Glace, which won the Szymborska Prize, is the culmination of her remarkable journey, and a profound meditation on the porosity, reactivity and receptivity of both the body and the natural world, and of their influences on one another.
