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The Feeling Sonnets are written in an English that is translingual not only because it engages other languages but also because it reflects upon itself in uncertainty as if it were the work of a language learner. Words, idioms, sentences, poetic conventions are made strange, dislocated, recontextualised to convey some of the linguistic effects of the migration experience, the experience of non-nativeness. The book includes four cycles of fourteen unrhymed, unmetered, logically Petrarchan sonnets. The first cycle asks about the relationship between interpretation and emotion: whether 'we feel the feelings that we call ours'. The second, mainly composed of 'daughter sonnets', describes bringin...
Captivating, innovative Ukrainian fiction about displaced women living in the shadow of the war with Russia 'This singular collection brings Ukraine, "the land of residual phenomena," entirely to life' Kirkus Reviews In Lucky Breaks, we encounter anonymous women from the margins of Ukrainian society, their lives upended by the ongoing conflict with Russia. A woman, bewildered by her broken umbrella, tries to abandon it like a sick relative; a beautiful florist suddenly disappears, her shop converted into a warehouse for propaganda; hiding out from the shelling, neighbours read horoscopes in the local paper that tell them when it's safe for them to go outside. In stories of linguistic verve and absurdist wit, Yevgenia Belorusets writes of trauma amidst the mundane, telling surreal, unsettling tales of survival in a shattered country.
F LETTER assembles the feminist poets who have palpably changed the Russian language over the last decade. Against the backdrop of state violence and oppression, this is electric dissent in pursuit of a democratic, egalitarian future. A lexicon for revolution worldwide. But this anthology's brilliance lies in its rhythm, energy, and depth of emotion--in its universal relevance rather than applied politics. As Eileen Myles writes of its verse in a foreword to the work, "there are lines like a curse that yodel radiantly out of the toothy mouth of the curser...lines that are just so fucking metonymic in their grace...I've been invited to witness. To smell the crowd and be charged by history."
“Pussy Riot are Vvedensky's disciples and his heirs. Katya, Masha, and I are in jail but I don’t consider that we’ve been defeated.... According to the official report, Alexander Vvedensky died on December 20, 1941. We don’t know the cause, whether it was dysentery in the train after his arrest or a bullet from a guard. It was somewhere on the railway line between Voronezh and Kazan. His principle of ‘bad rhythm’ is our own. He wrote: ‘It happens that two rhythms will come into your head, a good one and a bad one and I choose the bad one. It will be the right one.’ ... It is believed that the OBERIU dissidents are dead, but they live on. They are persecuted but they do not di...
The artists’ books made in Russia between 1910 and 1915 are like no others. Unique in their fusion of the verbal, visual, and sonic, these books are meant to be read, looked at, and listened to. Painters and poets—including Natalia Goncharova, Velimir Khlebnikov, Mikhail Larionov, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Mayakovsky— collaborated to fabricate hand-lithographed books, for which they invented a new language called zaum (a neologism meaning “beyond the mind”), which was distinctive in its emphasis on “sound as such” and its rejection of definite logical meaning. At the heart of this volume are close analyses of two of the most significant and experimental futurist books: Mir...
Poetry. "Eugene Ostashevsky combines elements of the Russian Absurdists with a very contemporary and very American performance idiom. The result is a poetry at once witty, incantatory and slyly subversive. And a great, careening ride..."--Michael Palmer. "Eugene Ostashevsky's Iterature goes out of its way not to be too careful, reveling in off-rhyme, visual rhyme, and any other method of linguistic play that might push the poet's language to the border of nonsense--or worse, incompetence. [...] A subterranean non-English grammar inform[s] his choices. [...] Not quite defeatist, he turns a wry, self-deprecating eye on everything and goes out of his way to dispel gravity"--Brian Kim Stefans in The Boston Review.
An original collection from one of the most active poets in contemporary literature. Winner of the 2019 International Poetry Prize from the City of Münster The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi is a poem-novel about the relationship between a pirate and a parrot who, after capturing a certain quantity of prizes, are shipwrecked on a deserted island, where they proceed to discuss whether they would have been able to communicate with people indigenous to the island, had there been any. Characterized by multilingual punning, humor puerile and set-theoretical, philosophical irony and narrative handicaps, Eugene Ostashevsky’s new large-scale project draws on sources as various as early modern texts about pirates and animal intelligence, old-school hip-hop, and game theory to pursue the themes of emigration, incomprehension, untranslatability, and the otherness of others.
An innovative, kaleidoscopic literary work about the siege of Leningrad and its aftermath by one of Russia's most acclaimed contemporary writers 'A precise, tremendous and beautiful book' Maria Stepanova, author of In Memory of Memory Growing up in Leningrad, Polina Barskova saw no trace of the estimated million people who died in the city during the Nazi blockade of 1941-44. As one of Russia's most admired and controversial contemporary writers, she has repeatedly returned to the archive of texts still being recovered from the siege, finding creative ways to commemorate these ghosts from her home city's past. A chorus of their voices and stories appears in Living Pictures, a breathtakingly ...
This Futurist opera was presented in snowy Petrograd in December 1913 to a riotous audience. The atonal music composed by Mikhail Matiushin accompanied the alogical libretto by Aleksei Kruchenykh, the action taking place in the 10th Land where "the windows of houses all face inside" and "all the paths go up to the earth," while the hands of a clock "both go backwards immediately before dinner." The cardboard costumes by Kazimir Malevich were surfaces lit by his roving colored spotlights, the characters bigger than life. This first English translation by Dr. Evgeny Steiner is accompanied by the Russian facsimile, followed by what is known of the musical score by Mikhail Matiushin, and a selec...
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