This Is Us Losing Count
$16.95
Additional Info
- ISBN: 978-1-949641-27-1
- Size: 6" x 7"
- Pages: 200
- Publication Date: March 8, 2022
- Distributed By: Publishers Group West
“The poems in this volume are bold and forthright yet bracingly controlled, vivid in their imagery and visionary in their imaginative reach. Taken together, they testify to a new efflorescence of Russian poetry—a blossoming that was seasons in the the making, like the January flowers in one of Alla Gorbunova’s lyrics, translated by Elina Alter: ‘white at first glance, but then / a thousandfold colors.’” —Boris Dralyuk, author of My Hollywood and Other Poems and editor-in-chief of The Los Angeles Review of Books
A woman surveys a changing city from her self-described “cloud tower,” recalling where buildings used to stand. A grandmother spends her hallucinatory final days convening with deceased friends and relatives visible only to her, including a small boy perched on top of the refrigerator. A voracious eater picks through memories in the form of breads, dumplings, sweets, and other snacks that never quite sate her, declaring “I write because I can’t eat enough.” In sinuous translations of verse both irreverent and profound, this fifth installment of Two Lines Press’s Calico series asks to what extent we must remember in order to reinvent.
Table of Contents
Other
“in the garden plots by the house…” | “in the cloud tower…” | “The country. April…” | “illumination of snow marine fish and plankton…”
Alla Gorbunova
Alla Gorbunova is a poet and prose writer whose work focuses on delicate, elusive questions about the basis of speech and the nature of reality. She was born in Leningrad and has published five collections of poems and three books of prose. Her poetry and prose have been translated into many languages, including a poetry collection in Italian and two books of prose in Italian and Bulgarian. She is the recipient of the Debut Literary Award, the Andrei Bely Prize, and the NOS Prize.
Books
Elina Alter
Elina Alter is a writer and translator. Her translations of Alla Gorbunova’s It’s the End of the World, My Love (Deep Vellum) and Oksana Vasyakina’s Wound (Catapult) are forthcoming. She is the editor of Circumference, a magazine of translation and international culture.
Books
“I was glad when Grandma died…” | “allow me to speak for another…” |
Ekaterina Simonova
Ekaterina Simonova is a poet from Nizhny Tagil. Now in Ekaterinburg, Simonova has published six poetry collections and was shortlisted for the 2020 Andrei Bely Prize. Simonova holds a prominent place in the contemporary vanguard of queer and feminist Russophone poetics. In her poems, Simonova plays with prose, deftly constructing simultaneously joyous and melancholy portraits of women and the objects that make a life. Simonova also edits the woman-run poetry series “InVersia.”
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Il’ia Karagulin
Il’ia Karagulin is a poet, translator, copy editor, and doctoral student in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University, where they research queerness, transness, and disability in twentieth-century Russian literature and poetry. Born in Almaty, Kazakhstan, they now live in New Haven, Connecticut. Their work has appeared in Hooligan Mag, Petfish, and at The Tank’s Flight Simulator.
Books
“The light switched off and—…”
Galina Rymbu
Galina Rymbu is, in the words of Time Magazine, “part of a new generation of Russian poets taking up language as a form of political protest, challenging state, societal, and patriarchal norms with poetry that draws from personal experience.” Her poetry collection Life in Space, translated by Joan Brooks and others, was published recently by Ugly Duckling Presse. She edits F-Pis’mo, an online magazine for feminist literature and theory, and is the coeditor of the translation anthology F Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry, released in the US and the UK by Isolarii.
Books
Poem for Food
Olga Sedakova
Olga Sedakova is one of Russia’s most revered poets today. Born in 1949, she emerged as a writer in the late Soviet Underground. In recent decades she has primarily published translations, essays, and cultural criticism, reflecting her growing importance as a voice of conscience. Sedakova’s poetry reflects a “longing for world culture” (Mandelstam) as well as an ongoing attempt to articulate an ethic and aesthetic grounded in Russian cultural traditions.
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Martha Kelly
Martha Kelly is the author of Unorthodox Beauty: Russian Modernism and Its New Religious Aesthetic and of numerous essays and scholarly articles. She is currently completing a new translated collection of Olga Sedakova’s verse in English and working on a monograph about Sedakova with the working title “How To Be a Russian Poet: The Public Life of Olga Sedakova.” She first met Dmitry Strotsev when interviewing him for her monograph.
Books
Night Sewing | Desire | Beads
Valeriya Yermishova
Valeriya Yermishova is a freelance French and Russian to English translator based in the New York City area. She earned an MA in Translation at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey (MIIS) and teaches at the Hunter College MA in Translation and Interpreting Program. She is the translator of Viktor Shklovsky’s Life of a Bishop’s Assistant and Sergey Kuznetsov’s The Round Dance of Water.
Books
Simple poems
Irina Kotova
Irina Kotova is a poet, prose writer, and essayist based in Moscow. She was born in the southern Russian city of Voronezh and holds degrees from the Voronezh State Medical Institute and from the Literary Institute in Moscow. She is the recipient of two literary awards and her work has appeared in many periodicals, including Vozdukh, Novy Mir, TextOnly, and NLO, and in four poetry collections. Her poems have been translated into Italian, Romanian, Greek, Portuguese, and English.
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Matvei Yankelevich
Matvei Yankelevich has translated Elena Guro, Daniil Kharms, Osip Mandelstam, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Alexander Vvedensky, as well as several contemporary Russian-language poets. He has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the National Endowment for Humanities, and was a co-recipient (with Eugene Ostashevsky) of the 2014 National Translation Award. He teaches translation and book arts at Columbia University’s School of the Arts.
Books
under the nails | in search of reality
“On driving into the city there’s a piercing…” | “The leaves are gone, it’s bleak. Weeks and months…” | “When a fly lands on the face of a cherished being…” | “It’s simply night, with white tree trunks…” | “He gave a generic name to perform a function.…” | “The evening’s itinerary, which runs…”
Oksana Vasyakina
Oksana Vasyakina is a Russian poetess, activist, and curator of cultural projects. She was born in 1989 in Ust-Ilimsk and graduated from the Gorky Literature Institute in 2016. Vasyakina was awarded the Lyceum Prize in 2019. Her first book of poetry, Женская проза (Women’s prose), was pub- lished in 2016, and a cycle of poetic texts, Ветер ярости (The wind of fury), was published in 2019. The English-language translation of Vasyakina’s first novel, Wound, will be published in the US in 2023 by Catapult.
Books
Elina Alter
Elina Alter is a writer and translator. Her translations of Alla Gorbunova’s It’s the End of the World, My Love (Deep Vellum) and Oksana Vasyakina’s Wound (Catapult) are forthcoming. She is the editor of Circumference, a magazine of translation and international culture.
Books
Ode to Death
Praise
“Despite the remarkably distinct stylings of the eight individual poets, the collection carries a level of cohesiveness and unity that is rarely found in even the most meticulously designed novels. Made even more impressive by the seamless work of seven talented translators (the original Russian remains on the pages, adjacent to the English translations), This Is Us Losing Count is for anyone interested poetry, dreams and memories.” —Shelf Awareness (starred review)
“Stunning…a fascinating glimpse into modern Russian poetry that leaves me longing for more.” —Book Riot
“The poems in this volume are bold and forthright yet bracingly controlled, vivid in their imagery and visionary in their imaginative reach. Taken together, they testify to a new efflorescence of Russian poetry — a blossoming that was seasons in the the making, like the January flowers in one of Alla Gorbunova’s lyrics, translated by Elina Alter: ‘white at first glance, but then / a thousandfold colors.’” —Boris Dralyuk, author of My Hollywood and Other Poems and Editor in Chief of The Los Angeles Review of Books
“‘the world will not hold you / the world is a very weak place to hold your gaze,’ writes Oksana Vasyakina in the final poem—a warning and a benediction. The poems in This Is Us Losing Count are heavy and anchored to their earth—snowed over by Siberian winters and memory’s static, carrying the lingering brutality of the past and facing down the opacity of the future. But their gravity manifests as steadfastness, as dedication in spite of themselves, as honesty as these poets seek the courage to survive and possibly thrive. A triumphant anthology, meticulously composed.” —Anna Claire Weber, White Whale Bookstore (Pittsburgh, PA)
“A wonderful collection of poems dealing with the heaviness of grief, the beauty of nature and the originality of the individual experience.” —Katie Kenney, Bank Square Books (Mystic, CT)
PRAISE FOR THE CALICO SERIES
“By turns cryptic and revealing, phantasmagorical and straightforward, these tales balance reality and fantasy on the edge of a knife.” —Publishers Weekly, *starred review* of That We May Live: Speculative Chinese Fiction
“Unbelievably exciting…These are poems to read and reread, repeating the lines as though they were a secret between yourself and the page.” —The Paris Review on Home: New Arabic Poems
“Essential, a gift that opens up the pleasures of new worlds.” —Hugh Raffles on Elemental: Earth Stories
“This eclectic bilingual anthology from queer Brazilian writers, both living and dead, is as expansive and full of life as the country itself…enticing and poignant.” —Publishers Weekly on Cuíer: Queer Brazil