Marek Torčík
- Czech Republic -
Marek Torčík (b. 1993, Přerov) is a poet, novelist, and journalist whose work unfolds in the shifting space between memory and language, between the fragmented and the continuous, between an intensely personal vantage point and the wider social and political contexts that shape individual experience. A graduate in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University in Prague, he made his debut as a poet, with the collection Rhizomy (Rhizomes, 2016), and then as a novelist, with his prose debut Rozložíš paměť (Memory Burn, Paseka, 2023), which was awarded both the Magnesia Litera for Prose and the Jiří Orten Award for authors under thirty. Most recently, he published Šedá podél cest (Grey Along the Roads, 2025), a compact, poetically charged work of short prose that extends his inquiry into memory and witnessing into a climate-marked present.
The title of his first book, Rhizomy, points directly to the conceptual metaphor at the heart of his early poetics. Drawing on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari—whose A Thousand Plateaus distinguishes between hierarchical, tree-like thinking (arborescent) and non-hierarchical, proliferating rhizomatic thought—Torčík positions his poetry as an enactment of the latter: “Rhizome nemá žádný začátek ani konec; je pořád uprostřed, mezi věcmi, mezibytí, intermezzo.” The rhizome, in this sense, becomes a way of thinking about language as a system without a single origin or definitive conclusion—an open, proliferating network of connections. In his own terms: “když řeknu lehá a něha, v hlavě / hashtagy jemných nuancí / #signifier #signified // binární vztahy/rhizomy? // větná fragmentace: / slovo utterance představuje otevřený systém / neideální. rozmělněný stav / slovní entropii.” Rhizomy is thus less a linear poetic statement than an ongoing process—a “mezibytí uvnitř jazyka” (“inter-being within language”) in which memory and word interweave, blur, and refract one another. Critics have described the collection as a “world of uneasy consciousness” in which the lyrical subject stands in a kind of pre-beginning and pre-end: aware of the instability of meaning, aware of the difficulty of living fully in a world whose coordinates are shifting. The poems are frequently fragmented, syntactically unstable, and alert to their own materiality; they treat the word not merely as a vehicle for meaning but as an object with its own gravity, sound, and entropy. This attention to linguistic process rather than fixed statement becomes an enduring feature of Torčík’s work, carrying over into his prose in both texture and structure.
As long as Rhizomy is an immersion into the internal architecture of language, then Rozložíš paměť (Memory Burn) brings that architecture into contact with the lived realities of the body, sexuality, class, and family history. At its core, the novel is an act of autofiction, yet it resists the conventional expectations of the genre. While its narrator shares the author’s name and biography—growing up as a gay youth in a small Moravian town—it is less a transparent memoir than a crafted text that interrogates the reliability of memory, the act of narration, and the ethics of speaking about one’s own and other people’s traumas. The book’s structure reflects this questioning: narration in the second person creates a deliberate depersonalisation, as though the self is both subject and object, observed and distanced. Memories appear, shift, and dissolve; the narrative does not so much proceed as it accrues, layering moments of childhood bullying, family dysfunction, first love, and the persistent tension between visibility and erasure. The relationship between Marek and Marian, a charismatic Romany classmate, becomes the novel’s emotional and structural centre—an intense, transformative connection that also exposes the social prejudices and familial fears surrounding them. It is in this love story that the narrator becomes most alive, and where the novel’s poetics of memory are most vividly realised.
Torčík’s prose here retains the qualities of his poetry: an attentiveness to rhythm, an ability to condense a psychological state into a single image, and a refusal to resolve complexity into moral simplification. Scenes are often built around sensory fragments—the texture of a street at dusk, the sound of a slammed door, the light falling across a familiar room—each functioning as a trigger for associative leaps in time. In one passage, the inability to remember a grandfather’s face other than through photographs becomes a meditation on the loss inherent in memory itself: what is preserved is already mediated, altered, and partial. Memory Burn is undeniably political in its portrayal of queer adolescence in a conservative environment, of poverty, and of structural exclusion, it resists the didacticism sometimes associated with testimonial prose. Instead, it stages the intersection of the personal and the political as a lived ambiguity: trauma does not ennoble, victimhood does not confer moral purity, and love—though transformative—is also subject to betrayal and loss. This moral and emotional complexity is one of the book’s defining strengths, placing it alongside the work of authors like Édouard Louis or Ocean Vuong while retaining a distinctly Central European sensibility. Throughout, Torčík’s vision is underpinned by an acute awareness of systemic forces—capitalism, nationalism, inherited patterns of behaviour—that shape and limit individual lives. Yet he also insists on the agency and complicity of his characters: the cycles of harm are sustained not only by external oppression but by the choices, fears, and evasions of those within them. This is perhaps why the novel’s moments of grace—acts of forgiveness, fleeting connections—are so striking: they are fragile, rare, and deeply human.
With Šedá podél cest (Grey Along the Roads), Torčík returns to a shorter, highly compressed prose that reads like a road-formed prose poem. The book’s world is bleached and particulate—ash drifting at the edges of vision, horizons losing definition—so that its central question becomes one of witnessing: what does looking do to us when the world is already burning, and what does not-looking cost? The pared, declarative sentence remains his instrument, but the register shifts towards a climate-inflected ethics of attention; photographs, frames, and the ethics of the lens recur as emblems of responsibility and distance. Here the intimate unit—partners, a child, a moving car—carries the planetary pressure, and Torčík’s longstanding preoccupation with memory and language translates into an examination of how images (and the act of making them) shape human conscience. It is a small book with a large after-image, extending his rhizomatic, fragment-conscious poetics into the lived weather of our time.
What unites Torčík’s work in both poetry and prose is a sustained engagement with the instability of meaning—whether in the linguistic play of Rhizomy or in the shifting, unreliable terrain of memory in Memory Burn. In both, the self is understood not as a fixed entity but as something constructed, refracted, and perpetually in motion, shaped by language as much as lived experience. His poetry teaches us to inhabit the space “between things,” to accept fragmentation as a natural state; his prose extends this lesson into the realm of narrative, where life itself resists linearity and closure. And in Šedá podél cest (Grey Along the Roads), his poetics turn toward the ethics of witnessing: the pared sentence and road-formed fragment test how we look at a world already burning, how images make and unmake conscience, how the intimate unit of a family carries planetary weather within it. Thus, Torčík occupies a distinctive place in contemporary Czech literature: as a poet whose work dismantles and reconfigures the building blocks of language, and as a prose writer whose narratives are built from the same material—precise, unstable, and alive with the tensions of the present. His writing reminds us that literature’s task is not to stabilise meaning but to keep it open, to allow the rhizome of memory, language, image, and experience to continue branching in unforeseen directions.
Essay written by Aljaž Koprivnikar
Poetry
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de–subject / de-subjekt
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On the Origin of Shadows / O původu stínů
