Author(s): Piotr Florczyk

Essay | Dance & Sport

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

As a former world-ranked swimmer whose journey toward naturalization and U.S. citizenship began with a swimming fellowship, Piotr Florczyk reflects on his own adventures in swimming pools while taking a closer look at artists, architects, writers, and others who have helped to cement the swimming pool's prominent and iconic role in our society and culture.
Swimming Pool explores the pool as a place where humans seek to attain the unique union between mind and body.

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Review: Having spent most of my life around a pool, no one would fault me taking it for granted. But Swimming Pool tells a unique and compelling story of the swimming pool, allowing me to appreciate that it's more than just a place to cool off or go back and forth along a black line. Florczyk has done a remarkable job bringing to the surface the potentially unanticipated way that pools have affected us, for the good and the bad. * Rada Owen, USA Olympic Swim Team, 2000 *
A beautifully associative work, in which Florczyk makes visible the often-hidden role that swimming pools have long played in the global artistic, cultural, and literary landscape. Whether shaped like kidney beans and back lit or of Olympic dimensions with the perfect gutters and that ever-present black line-whether sighted jewel-like from the air as signs of suburban 'white flight,' or drained, abandoned, and re-appropriated by the skateboarders who also surf-swimming pools are emblems of everything from sanctuary, to privilege, to athleticism, to leisure. Florczyk's language flows around this object, and I encourage all readers to plunge in. * Emily Hodgson Anderson, Professor of English and College Dean of Undergraduate Education, University of Southern California, USA *

Contents: 1. Where Do You Swim? 2. What Is Your Pool? 3. Why Do You Swim? 4. Who Gets to Swim? Afterword: From Pool to Page Acknowledgments Notes Index

Author Biography: Piotr Florczyk is Assistant Professor of Global Literary Studies at the University of Washington, USA, and an award-winning poet and translator. His recent books include the poetry collection From the Annals of Krakow, which is based on the testimonies of Holocaust survivors, as well as numerous volumes of translations, including Invisible, the selected poems of Jacek Gutorow, which was named Autumn 2021 Translation Choice by Poetry Book Society in the UK.