Konstrukce (/kɒnstrʌkseɪ/) is a Czech word meaning construction. It’s equally correct to say: podívejte se na konstrukci na Krasové! (look at the construction on Krasová!), as it is to say: veškerá morálka je lidská konstrukce (all morality is a human construct).

Constructions [Konstrukce] is a sequence of poetry that challenges our ways of communicating, spoken and written. In three distinct poetic movements, the question of certainty in our daily language is opened up.

Reconstructions [Rekonstrukce] elaborates the project that began in Constructions.  Voices from the everyday speak through a second-hand language and are confronted with their own lives.

Constructions and Reconstructions are available from tall-lighthouse, Good Press, the London Review Bookshop, and the Poetry Book Society. Read reviews in Fitzcarraldo Editions, Sphinx, and Write Out Loud.

Selections from Constructions and Reconstructions have been translated into Czech by tall.lighthouse.prague.

The pieces collected as Konstrukce and Rekonstrukce are assembled from fragments, sentences noted down during online conversations, faults, slips, elements of narrative intentional and accidental. The speakers have mostly Czech, but also Slovak, Ukranian, or Russian, as their central languages, not English. They are friends, tutored students, acquaintances, and strangers. They work in offices, schools, farms, factories, academies, radio-stations, hotels, banks, and warehouses. They show there is no fixed manner of speaking, no true native or grammatically perfect form, only ways to communicate. Pain will always be pain, wrapped in plastic, or in language. A baby can never be inseperated. Words can’t always rotate, and are poor at retaining liquid. Sometimes, even far from the Dead Sea, we can almost see the dead.

Joshua Calladine-Jones (@urneburiall) is a writer and the literary-critic-in-residence for Prague Writers’ Festival. His poetry has appeared in a number of journals, including Marble Poetry, POETiCA, Literární, Beyond the Underground, and Anthropocene. His prose has appeared in Freedom, Minor Literature[s], The Stinging Fly, 3:AM, and The Hong Kong Review of Books.

Site by L.J.