Red Shifting

by Alexander Skidan

Translated from the Russian by Genya Turovskaya and Eugene Ostashevsky. Alexander Skidan is one of Russia's most important contemporary poets. With language that is at once literary, cinematic, philosophical, journalistic, his innovative writing calls into question the distinction between poetry and philosophy. In Red Shifting, Skidan blurs and shifts the boundaries between the two as literary genres and as modes of discourse. His work is both lyrical and disjointed, addressing unflinchingly the literary and historical condition of post-Soviet Russia, engaging in continuous discourse with what Walter Benjamin would call "the origins of the present crisis". He lives in St. Petersburg where he is also a literary and cultural critic, journalist, and translator, as well as one of the founding members of the collaborative art and politics publication What Is To Be Done. In 2006 he won the Andrey Bely prize for Non-Fiction.

Genres: Poetry

173 pages, Paperback

First published May 30, 2007

Reviews

[hence · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book is just so everything. like wow. i cant even come up with words to describe it im in love with it. especially piercing of the lower lip like its a epic poem; fucking 30 pages and i was so absorbed in every inch of it.

[laila* · Rating 5 out of 5]

GALL BLADDER: honestly not cheesy at all. i’ve been having a hard (read:awful) time w poetry lately bc it all feels so trite—not this though💖🫀🍸

[Daniela · Rating 5 out of 5]

Skidan makes a lot of moves I usually despise (ars poetica, flipping back and forth between poetry and prose, name dropping all the illicit substances he and his friends have ever consumed, and making self-conscious references to Heidegger), but his language is so exhilarating that I'm willing to let him get away with it.

[Rick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Skidan’s maximal style slices through cultures and discourses with a disarming ease, and the result is type of contemporary gothic classicism, in which a Peugot, Deleuze, and Pan can all shake out of the same stanza, and language itself moves toward climax a few pages later.

[Holly Raymond · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great little edition by Ugly Duckling Press. If you like Tamura Ryuichi you'll probably find something to latch onto in Skidan's densely allusive poetry, which also (I hate reviews like this) has a little Victor Pelevin in it. Ugh. Sorry.

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of images shifting through history, transportation, self, literature, myth, poetry -- and language(s).