This Lamentable City

$11.95

by Polina Barskova, edited by Ilya Kaminsky

Polina Barskova’s poems are a zesty paradoxical concoction: bawdy and erudite, elegant and raw, subtle and brazen. As Ilya Kaminsky attests in his introduction to This Lamentable City, “Barskova is an elegiac poet who brings to her American readers a language formally inventive, worldly and humorous. One of her strengths is her ability to bring together strikingly erotic, sensual images… with a deep sense of history and culture.… In Russian, Barskova is a master of meter, rhyme, and alliteration, and… (w)hat comes across in English is the tonality of the poems, the clarity of her vocal play and images, her intricacy of address.” Though her prize-winning books of poetry in Russian have earned an international reputation, and individual poems have appeared in prestigious journals and anthologies — for instance, in Contemporary Russian Poetry (Dalkey Archive, 2008) and An Anthology of Contemporary Russian Women Poets (Iowa, 2005) — this is the first book of Barskova’s poems to be published in translation, in a handsome dual-language edition.

by Polina Barskova, edited by Ilya Kaminsky

Polina Barskova’s poems are a zesty paradoxical concoction: bawdy and erudite, elegant and raw, subtle and brazen. As Ilya Kaminsky attests in his introduction to This Lamentable City, “Barskova is an elegiac poet who brings to her American readers a language formally inventive, worldly and humorous. One of her strengths is her ability to bring together strikingly erotic, sensual images… with a deep sense of history and culture.… In Russian, Barskova is a master of meter, rhyme, and alliteration, and… (w)hat comes across in English is the tonality of the poems, the clarity of her vocal play and images, her intricacy of address.” Though her prize-winning books of poetry in Russian have earned an international reputation, and individual poems have appeared in prestigious journals and anthologies — for instance, in Contemporary Russian Poetry (Dalkey Archive, 2008) and An Anthology of Contemporary Russian Women Poets (Iowa, 2005) — this is the first book of Barskova’s poems to be published in translation, in a handsome dual-language edition.

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About the Author

In her homeland of Russia, Polina Barskova is considered a prodigy, one of the most accomplished and daring of the younger poets. Born in 1976 in Leningrad, now called St. Petersburg, as before, she began publishing poems in journals at age nine and released the first of her six books as a teenager. She came to the United States at the age of twenty to pursue a Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, having already earned a graduate degree in classical literature at the state university in St. Petersburg. Barskova now lives in Massachusetts and teaches at Hampshire College.

About the Translator

Ilya KaminskyIlya Kaminsky is author of Dancing in Odessa (Tupelo, 2004) and co-editor of The Ecco Book of International Poetry (2010) and editor of This Lamentable City: Poems of Polina Barskova (Tupelo, 2010). He teaches at San Diego State University and in the New England College M.F.A. Program. He lives in San Diego, California.

Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, former Soviet Union in 1977, and is now widely regarded as the most exciting young poet in America. In 1993, his family received asylum from the American government and came to the United States. Ilya received his BA from Georgetown University and subsequently became the youngest person ever to serve as George Bennet Fellow Writer in Residence at Phillips Exeter Academy. Dancing in Odessa is his first full length book. In 2005 alone, Ilya Kaminsky won Whiting Prize, the 2005 Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the 2005 Foreword Poetry Book of the Year award.

Advanced Praise

“… separation in Barskova’s poems (death, loneliness, heartbreak) is faced with this same curious mixture of hunger, enthusiasm, and anger, as if the hugeness of our human feeling — its ability to reach forward and back in time — were more important than our objective bodied smallness. Russia’s history is a colossal presence in this work, but humans don’t feel tiny in it. There’s an animating voice that suggests life even in ruin[.]” —Jay Thompson, Jacket2

“Barskova is a poet whose voice is at once so intimate and taunting, it can be almost impossible to resist her. ‘Are you still frightened,’ begins the book’s first poem, ‘my clueless devochka?’ It is this closeness, as though her lines are whispered in your ear, that allows Barskova to turn away from us with such terrific effect in her poems. ‘Now you will forget what you desired,’ she writes, ‘Now,/ Who you were.’… Barskova demonstrates an extraordinary amount of vocal variation, as in ‘When someone dies… ,’ in which Barskova is clear and unforgiving in her instructions on how to handle a dead man: ‘Right now you should lick him.’…Barskova’s is a voice of stunning originality and eroticism.” —Publishers Weekly

Format: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-932195-83-5