Leszek Musa Czachorowski (b.1953) is a prominent Polish poet of Tatar descent. He also refers to himself as Musa Çaxarxan Czachorowski, but most scholars refer to him as Musa Czachorowski. He and Selim Chazbijewicz are the “national” poets of the Polish Tatars and are acclaimed for reviving the Tatar culture as well as bringing their literature to national and international attention.1 He writes in the Polish language, but his cultural heritage is rooted in Polish and Tatar culture. He has managed to achieve a balanced synthesis of his cultural roots in his poetry. His works require, from his readers and researchers as well, an understanding of both Polish and Tatar culture.2 His contribution to the Polish Tatar culture is invaluable, he is a prominent and widely known poet, and also a cultural organizer whose efforts significantly contributed to the Polish Tatars’ cultural revival at the end of the twentieth century.3Since the nineteen seventies Czachorowski has written or contributed to sixteen volumes of poetry. His most recent volume is Obca: Ballady oraz inne wiersze (2020.) The volume's title is the feminine form of the English Stranger, or Other, while the volume's subtitle, Ballads and Other Poems, suggests that the whole collection could be read as a ballad about the poet's inner struggle, and the poems are the elements of which the ballad is constructed.The volume Obca, contains twenty-two free verse poems and only two have some form of rhythm and rhyme. In general, Czachorowski does not assign titles to his poems and often returns to the same tropes and topics,4 such as the motif of the steppe, dreams, visions, and the uncertainties of human existence.Each of the poems has a simple diction and a plain tone, but each poem gives the volume a sense of vibration between topics, tropes, and literary themes. Such vibration may be observed in the frequent changes of speakers’ roles, from a storyteller through a girl singing to a wise philosopher. Similar vibration can be observed in the poems’ endings, where the speaker keeps the readers in uncertainty or just shocks them with very unusual associations of ideas, as in the seventeenth verse: “I ripped your heart out / just to put it back into your own ribcage,” or the description of death by an intense metaphor: “Otherwise it was so white, and so smooth, without life like a white marble mask,” or the description of a nightmare from the twenty-first line: “My own fingers turned into predatory grubs” (pp. 31, 24, 35). This vibration and the unusual associations recur through the whole volume, so the reader's impression could be that the whole volume is a single piece of work, and the separate verses and poems are rather chapters of the Obca poetic collection.The main topics of the collection are loneliness, strangeness, foreignness, love, death, and God, the main principles of human life, packed into beautifully described tropes and motifs that are surprising and even shocking. In the ninth poem, Czachorowski compares love to a deer hunt, but the fulfillment is far from being romantic: “and you hold me as your chosen one / with a wound instead of a wreath [. . .] ” (p. 22). The sixth poem is also a good example of such a surprising image, when the speaker describes a scene about a woman who loses her mind at the bus station. The speaker compares her to a croaking bird who calls for God. In the third poem another unusual image appears that underscores the growing anxiety of the speaker: “more holes are burning in my stomach” (p. 14).The poetic tools used by Czachorowski are very simple but effective. His language resembles natural speech; however, the meaning behind his tropes, topics, and words is something unusual and requires a little more mental effort due to the given interpretation possibilities of his poetry rooted in two different cultural backgrounds.5 This fact also enriches his poems with an enigmatic mystery and ambiguity, and so his works can be analyzed from a synthetic point of view that encompasses both of the poet‘s cultural and creative backgrounds.The poetry collection could be divided into two cycles, the first one contains four poems, the fifth being a cut-off point, followed by a new cycle consisting of the remaining poems from the volume. Of the twenty-two poems only two bear a title, the fifth and the eleventh, which is also the title poem of the collection.The first cycle is about the lyrical experience of God's presence. The speaker throughout these four poems describes an inner journey and a diary of such experiences. All of the four poems could be interpreted as calls for God, as seeking a connection with him. However, the poems are dominated by the feelings of uncertainty, loneliness, and fading hopes, all of them very characteristic themes in Czachorowski's poetry. Czachorowski's God is not linked to any religion, even though he is a Muslim, his poetic representation of God is rather a universal depiction. The lines like “Boże, wołałem Boże” (God, I called God) in the first poem or the line from the second poem “Boże! Słyszysz mnie? Słyszysz?” (Lord! Do you hear me? Do you hear?) are all desperate calls for God (pp. 10, 13). In the third poem the speaker describes God as a source of power for living and as an inspiring force; however God's intentions are not known. So, the uncertainty and insecurity remain a dominant force in one's life according to the speaker, who is still seeking the path to the Lord.The fifth poem ends the cycle about God, but it refers to the godless society of communist Poland, where the hopelessness and humdrum reality were the determining force in the Polish people's lives. This verse brings the readers back to the earth, and new themes are investigated by the poet in the next cycle of the volume.This new cycle is evidence of Czachorowski‘s outstanding poetic achievement, and it is the essence of his sensitive self-reflective poetry that encompasses distant cultures, states of mind, feelings, and mysteries. In the second cycle, the speaker often changes roles, gender, and identities, which makes the verses an interesting blend of the elements that build Czachorowski‘s world and consciousness.The most dominant theme in the cycle is the depiction of women and their relation to the world. This is something new to Czachorowski's poetry, but he manages to describe their feelings, problems, and existence through the feminine speakers who appear in the majority of the cycle's poems. He describes the women's desires, fears, identity crises, and even the nature of love.The importance of this cycle is in its message. The speaker of the cycle's poems tries to become the voice of the greatest minority in Eastern Europe, the women. And I think he perfectly knows what it means to be a member of a minority because he has been also struggling with his identity and status throughout his life and that makes him an authentic spokesperson.The cycle is also full of the tropes and motifs that are very characteristic to Czachorowski's poetry. He guides the readers to the borderlands of dreams, visions, and reality, in the end leaving everyone in uncertainty about the mysteries of life. He also writes about Tatar traditions and uses Tatar symbols to describe the misery of life, giving an insight to the struggles of identity crises, loneliness, and hopelessness. However, the organizing motif in the cycle is strangeness, a feeling that is so often described in Czachorowski's works, but in this volume he tries to tell us what it feels like to be a stranger with his role-playing female speaker. So the reader gets a full and symbolically complex work that encompasses identities, anxieties, dreams, reality, and frustrations, feelings well known to everyone but described in a fascinating manner.I think that the last poem can serve as a summary of his thoughts on personal identity. The poem is about the failure to fit into the personality and role determined by opportunities. The situation is summarized by Czachorowski's typical last line summary: “I tylko człowiek nie dorasta do swojej roli” (Only the human is not able to measure up to his role) (p. 36).After reading all twenty-two poems of the Obca collection, we finish a long journey through identities, symbols, dreams, vision, and illusions. We may get a complex but confusing picture of how Czachorowski's world is built, a world that has been forged by the poet himself by his inner struggles, anxieties, marginalization, and loneliness. I would strongly recommend this poetic volume to those who want to get an insight into the lives of an Eastern European minority. Musa Czachorowski‘s poems and ballads with Tatar motifs, blended with contemporary Polish culture, prove him to be a true bard of multiple cultures and identities.