Description

TwoLines Press, paperback

Publication Date:March 29, 2022

Publisher Marketing: InThis Is Us Losing Count, eight contemporary Russian poets obliterate old conventions in their efforts to reckon with the past.

Here memories take the form of housewares, specters, city streets, and even foods that can weigh down, haunt, disorient, and bloat but never quite sate us. Alla Gorbunova (translated by Elina Alter) surveys a changing city from her self-described cloud tower, recalling where buildings used to stand, and through this double vision of past and present she unspools the small but extraordinary details that might otherwise have been lost to time. Ekaterina Simonova (translated by Ilia Karagulin) dwells in her dying grandmothers hallucinatory final days, spent convening with deceased friends and relatives, visible only to her. And Galina Rymbu (translated by Eugene Ostashevsky) assembles a feast of breads, dumplings, sweets, and other snacks, declaring I write because I cant eat enough. In sinuous translations of verse both irreverent and sentimental, this fifth installment of Two Lines Presss Calico Series asks to what extent we must remember in order to reinvent.

Poets:Galina Rymbu, Alla Gorbunova, Oksana Vasyakina, Ekaterina Simonova, Olga Sedakova, Nikita Sungatov, Irina Kotova & Aleksandra Tsybulia