What do you think?
Rate this book
Gogol In Rome
Katia Kapovich creates a gallery of narrative portraits that are both unheroic and unforgettable - mute children, laundering women, Moldovan homosexuals, beggars, pickpockets, peasants, Israeli Bedouins, Russian draftees, Soviet boy scouts, political convicts, all at home in Dostoyevskian, borderline worlds. She documents the great beauty that can emerge from marginalized existence.
- GenresPoetry
96 pages, Paperback
First published June 25, 2004
22 people want to read
About the author
Katia Kapovich
6 books5 followersKatia Kapovich (Russian: Ка́тя Капо́вич) (born 1960) is a Russian poet now living in the United States. She writes in both Russian and English.
She was born in 1960 in Kishinev, Moldavian SSR, Soviet Union (now Chișinău, Moldova), the only child of Jewish parents. She emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1990. In 2002 she received the Witter Bynner Fellowship from the United States Library of Congress. Her first book in English, Gogol in Rome (ISBN 1-84471-046-7), was published in 2004 by Salt Publishing, and was shortlisted for the Poetry Trust's 2005 Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize.
Her poem 'The Green One Over There' was included in the anthology Poetry 180 (edited by Billy Collins, Random House, 2003; ISBN 0-8129-6887-5) which grew out of the Library of Congress's Poetry 180 poetry-for-schools project.
Her work has appeared in periodicals including the London Review of Books, News from the Republic of Letters, and Novy Mir (in Russian).
She is one of the editors of Fulcrum (annual).
(from Wikipedia)
She was born in 1960 in Kishinev, Moldavian SSR, Soviet Union (now Chișinău, Moldova), the only child of Jewish parents. She emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1990. In 2002 she received the Witter Bynner Fellowship from the United States Library of Congress. Her first book in English, Gogol in Rome (ISBN 1-84471-046-7), was published in 2004 by Salt Publishing, and was shortlisted for the Poetry Trust's 2005 Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize.
Her poem 'The Green One Over There' was included in the anthology Poetry 180 (edited by Billy Collins, Random House, 2003; ISBN 0-8129-6887-5) which grew out of the Library of Congress's Poetry 180 poetry-for-schools project.
Her work has appeared in periodicals including the London Review of Books, News from the Republic of Letters, and Novy Mir (in Russian).
She is one of the editors of Fulcrum (annual).
(from Wikipedia)
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
November 24, 2022
She’s a bit dry, sometimes even cold, but it’s alright because she’s also precise, sharp, profusely tender between the lines. She reminds me a lot of J.M. Coetzee. What Coetzee’s poetry might be. And I’m totally in love with both of them.
January 20, 2022
Often searing, always poignant, sometimes heartbreaking, Kaia Kapovich's poems cover life, loves, relationships, loss, and political vagaries past and present in both Russia and the West.
February 15, 2016
Her poems often begin in a very unassuming way, and then by the end they have punched you in the stomach.
(courtesy of Mariam)
---
favorite fragments of poems:
pg 10
Landscape moves behind curtains,
hills roll out into a plain. Last night I noticed
we were going slower: a bookshelf in a suitcase,
the windmill of a dusty fan, a fly on the faucet.
pg 13
I open a door (not the one I open)
and there's a gothic shadow
all over a rusty Christmas tree
leaning against a street lamp.
I take a step, two steps, from the porch.
A white step, a black step in the air,
Everything wears bright auras
and there is no perception of depth
between the real tree and the unreal,
between my body and its double, me.
pg 21 a paper plane to nowhere
pg 29
Of Putin he says,
"Shitty government but its very shittiness
contributes to the development of political culture,
because at least there is something to oppose."
A classic '60s dissident, my father couldn't
live in the West. There's nothing to oppose there.
He says the atmosphere of freedom makes him shrink.
pg 40
The next summer I moved to another city
to study literature.
Are they still running through snow behind me?
pg 43
Five months later he calls me crying:
"She ditched me without explanation. Why?" -
"I have no idea." That night she told me.
"No, nothing is wrong. I'll live by myself.
I like my own life, waking late,
not emptying my ashtray every half an hour.
Today I went into the bathroom
and saw something he would have killed me for:
my panties and bra on an open book
of modern French poetry, and I rejoiced."
pg 58 tanya
I also knew that she hadn't killed herself,
whatever it might look like.
She simply sat on a wooden bench,
an open pad in her lap,
drawing the naked trees
glistening white after an ice storm,
a dead fountain under a crust of snow,
black crows on staircase banisters.
She must have warmed herself from time to time
with gulps of brandy
(she had developed a drinking problem
when working at the hospital).
So she sat for hours, oblivious to the snow
and the arriving darkness,
as the temperature kept falling and falling.
pg 66
"How d you get them to be black and white?"
pg 70
For ten years the window's turquoise square
has held my eyes in its simple frame.
Now, face to face with the darkening sky,
what more can I say to the glass but thanks
for being transparent, seamless, wide
and stretching perspective across the size
of the visible.
pg 79
Sometimes a night is just a night.
Sleeping bags move from love like dunes in the wind.
pg 85
I talk in my sleep, my husband says
Last night I caught the tail of a long sentence.
I had dreamed of a locked iron case,
a willow tree and a black sterling's nest.
"These are the three main symptoms of emptiness,"
I heard myself say and was
immediately awakened by my own voice.
I didn't risk going to bed again and stayed in the kitchen
until the night evaporated.
(courtesy of Mariam)
---
favorite fragments of poems:
pg 10
Landscape moves behind curtains,
hills roll out into a plain. Last night I noticed
we were going slower: a bookshelf in a suitcase,
the windmill of a dusty fan, a fly on the faucet.
pg 13
I open a door (not the one I open)
and there's a gothic shadow
all over a rusty Christmas tree
leaning against a street lamp.
I take a step, two steps, from the porch.
A white step, a black step in the air,
Everything wears bright auras
and there is no perception of depth
between the real tree and the unreal,
between my body and its double, me.
pg 21 a paper plane to nowhere
pg 29
Of Putin he says,
"Shitty government but its very shittiness
contributes to the development of political culture,
because at least there is something to oppose."
A classic '60s dissident, my father couldn't
live in the West. There's nothing to oppose there.
He says the atmosphere of freedom makes him shrink.
pg 40
The next summer I moved to another city
to study literature.
Are they still running through snow behind me?
pg 43
Five months later he calls me crying:
"She ditched me without explanation. Why?" -
"I have no idea." That night she told me.
"No, nothing is wrong. I'll live by myself.
I like my own life, waking late,
not emptying my ashtray every half an hour.
Today I went into the bathroom
and saw something he would have killed me for:
my panties and bra on an open book
of modern French poetry, and I rejoiced."
pg 58 tanya
I also knew that she hadn't killed herself,
whatever it might look like.
She simply sat on a wooden bench,
an open pad in her lap,
drawing the naked trees
glistening white after an ice storm,
a dead fountain under a crust of snow,
black crows on staircase banisters.
She must have warmed herself from time to time
with gulps of brandy
(she had developed a drinking problem
when working at the hospital).
So she sat for hours, oblivious to the snow
and the arriving darkness,
as the temperature kept falling and falling.
pg 66
"How d you get them to be black and white?"
pg 70
For ten years the window's turquoise square
has held my eyes in its simple frame.
Now, face to face with the darkening sky,
what more can I say to the glass but thanks
for being transparent, seamless, wide
and stretching perspective across the size
of the visible.
pg 79
Sometimes a night is just a night.
Sleeping bags move from love like dunes in the wind.
pg 85
I talk in my sleep, my husband says
Last night I caught the tail of a long sentence.
I had dreamed of a locked iron case,
a willow tree and a black sterling's nest.
"These are the three main symptoms of emptiness,"
I heard myself say and was
immediately awakened by my own voice.
I didn't risk going to bed again and stayed in the kitchen
until the night evaporated.
July 2, 2007
Jugular and operatic, Kapovich's tome is one of upheaval and disparity told through the metrics of song with disarming sincerity. Intentionally (and mostly successfully) derivative, her vignettes channel Russias' stalwart canon in their descriptions of the post-Soviet/new Russian experience. An essential piece of identity poetics.
December 18, 2008
A famous poet in Russian, here Kapovich makes her debut as a wonderful, beautiful poet in English.
February 21, 2009
This Russian poet's first book written in English, a tremendous success. Blended influences of Russian, English and French poetic traditions.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews