The Łódź area in Poland has a proud literary and publishing tradition—in Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew, German. An impressive list of artists, poets, and fiction writers is part of the fabric of this place. A community of arts and literary people at the University of Łódź started Dekadentzya with hopes that, in its own way, it will echo and carry on a tradition that has shaped literary Łódź and Poland.
We are beginning as an annual publication, with a particular focus on new and established poets and writers from Łódź, from Poland, from Central and Eastern Europe. But we aim to catch good work from further afield, too. Thus, you will find an international mix in our pages, currently no fewer than nine different nationalities represented—depending on how you count them. Everything here is in English: some of it written by people whose first language is not English; and some that has been translated, mostly from Polish works. We like these strands, and this variety, the way that a secret not-English runs through the English, opening the reader to new thoughts, scrubbing old words down to something new, something strange.