F Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry

by Galina Rymbu (Editor)

Genres: Poetry, Feminism, Literature, Russia

180 pages, Paperback

Published October 18, 2020

About the author

Galina Rymbu (Russian: Галина Георгиевна Рымбу ) is a poetess, literary critic, curatrix, and philosopher from Lviv, Ukraine. Born in 1990 in Omsk, Siberia, Rymbu graduated from the Gorky Institute of Literature in Moscow and received a Masters in socio-political philosophy from the European University at Saint Petersburg. She is the co-foundress and curatrix of the Arkady Dragomoshchenko Poetry Prize for young Russian-language poets. She teaches at the St. Petersburg School of New Film and has organized seminars dedicated to feminist literature and the theory of “F-writing.” She is on the editorial board of the poetry series Novye stikhi (Poriadok Slov Publishing House). Her poetry has been translated into English, German, Spanish, Swedish, Italian, Polish, and Latvian, and has been published in the journals Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, Vozdukh, Translit, Snob, n+1, Arc Poetry, The White Review, Berlin Quarterly, Music&Literature, Asymptote, and Powder Keg among others. She has published five books of poetry, including one in English translation. She was the 2017 poet laureate of the Poetry Without Borders festival in Riga, and participates in festivals, conferences, and seminars all over Europe.

Reviews

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

F Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry is, according to its publisher, “the first-ever Russian magazine and platform dedicated to feminist and queer writing”—which is almost a moot point given the (quasi-)illegal status of Russia’s LGBQT+ communities and publications, as well as Putin’s and the Russian general public’s hostility towards sexual and gender minorities. This bi-lingual publication of a dozen of F Letter’s contributors acts to further disseminate these poems in their native language, which is otherwise difficult to do.

Although American readers may be familiar with decades of easy access to confessional poems that intersect the personal with the political, with domestic abuse, with cultural degradation of women, and so on*, the poems in F Letter are fresh, powerful, and unique, not mere Western knockoffs. One needn’t be a Westerner or a Western woman to appreciate the force, sentiment, and sanity of these poems. In an interesting political move, Russian feminists and queers have reappropriated the term “poetess” exactly to emphasize the creation and experience represented in the poems as specifically female-gendered.

My favorite poems from this collection are “These people didn’t know my father” by Oksana Vasyakina and “My Vagina” by Galina Rymbu, co-founding editor of F Letter (F pis'o, in Russian).

[Marc · Rating 4 out of 5]

You're left with the impression by this little book (isolarii's second release), that the current feminist poetry scene in Russia is thriving, kicking and screaming against injustice, and writing any damn well it wants.

A couple of favorites:
--------------------------
Excerpts from “These people didn’t know my father” by Oksana Vasyakina
I often imagine that instead of books I’m
hauling
dynamite
I store it specifically for the secret terrorist
organization
of women and children struggling against
patriarchy
----------------------------
(pgs later from the same poem above)
someone once told me
that a poem is a pure thing that doesn’t
have a single unnecessary word

no I think

a poem
is a place you lick raw that’s what a
poem is
----------------------------
Excerpt from “The Empty Store” by Yulia Podlubnova
Generation of cocacolons vs
generation of televisionaries.
Clacking keyboards---
women with wiry perms.
Volumes of poetry full of world weariness.
Bloks, superbloks, mainframes away…
Orthodoxed alive.
Sieg-Heil grasping
at air.

I look at empty skies full of planes.
My boss.
Her name is Motherland

[Renée De Coster · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read the poem "My Vagina"

[Eva Helena · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read the poem ‘My Vagina’ for my class on Russian literature and I am very curious how that class is going to go… also I am sooooo intrigued to read this entire collection of poetry!!

[Sonja · Rating 5 out of 5]

F Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry is a wonderful small book of current feminist poetry written in Russian, with translations into English by Eugene Ostashevsky, Ainsley Morse, Helena Keenan, Kit Eginton, Valyzhna Mort and Kevin M.F. Platt. The Russian-speaking poets, however, are from different places—Ukraine, Chechnya, Azerbaijan, the Far East and Far north of Siberia as well as other cities in Russia. It is a bilingual edition, so if you read Russian, it is great to be able to read the original.
My favorite poem is the last one by Galina Rymbu of Ukraine called My Vagina:
“I didn’t know then that everyone had an interest in my vagina:
the state, my parents, gynecologists, strange men,
Orthodox priests with epaulets under their robes…”
And on and on.
Other poets in the anthology are Lisa Yusupova, Daria Serenko, Lolita Agamalova, Oksana Vasyakina, Elena Georgievskaya, Stanislava Mogileva, Ekaterina Simonova, Nastya Denisova, and Yulia Podlubnova.
Also included, Elena Kostyleva writes specifically about the torture and persecution of LGBTQ people in Chechnya while Egana Djabbarova writes about the violence against women and LGBTQ people in Muslim cultures of the former Soviet Union.
The poetry is political as well as personal and gives readers an idea of what is being written by feminists today. An anthology worth reading.