This Is Us Losing Count

Calico Series #9

by Alla Gorbunova, Ekaterina Simonova, Galina Rymbu

In distinct voices and styles, the poets in This Is Us Losing Count reckon with the weight of the past, as memories in the form of household objects, buildings, specters, and meals accumulate on the page. Ekaterina Simonova details a grandmother’s end-of-life visions; her final days are spent convening with her dead loved ones, whispering and laughing, happy to be reunited. In insatiable verse, Galina Rymbu assembles a feast of breads, dumplings, sweets, and other snacks, declaring “I write because I can’t eat enough.” And Alla Gorbunova surveys a changing city from her self-described “cloud tower,” recalling where buildings used to stand, and through this double vision of past and present she unspools the small but extraordinary details that might otherwise be lost to time.

With this fifth installment of Two Lines Press’s Calico Series, it’s clear that Russian poetry is in the midst of a new golden era. In language that shimmers with life, this new generation of poets demonstrates a refusal to accept the structural or moralizing conventions of the past. Instead, they ask us to give ourselves over to poetry as we would a memory, letting it wash over us.

Genres: Poetry, Russia

192 pages, Paperback

First published March 8, 2022

Reviews

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good anthology of eight contemporary Russian poets, from the wonderful Calico series of Two Lines Press. Alternately haunting and playful (but mostly the former), these poems were a nice read on a quiet summer morning.

[Cristhian · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s… something

[Brendan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A hauntingly beautiful collection of poems. The Calico Series can do no wrong.

[Jack McClelland · Rating 4 out of 5]

A strong poetry collection from Russia. The eight poets featured in this anthology create a dynamic collage of the modern Russian poetry scene.

This is a great book for poetry lovers, even better for those with an interest in the Russian poetry scene. It is neatly compiled and gracefully translated, and succeeds in pairing a wide variety of poets from Russia under one roof. From the old guard of Soviet dissidents (Olga Sedakova) to millennial masterminds (Nikita Sungatov, Oksana Vasyakina, et al.) this collection traverses a wide poetic landscape. There's pandemic malaise, an "ode to death" (doesn't get more Russian than that), and much much more packed in this small book.

A couple of hair-splitting critiques: I wish the publishers had offered more credit to the editor (Sarah Coolidge--her name isn't printed once throughout the book), and placed the author & translator bios ahead of each section of poetry, so the reader knows a bit about what they're jumping into. Also, dates for the poems would have been nice. Although I'm sure most of the poems were written in the last 5-10 years, I was surprised to find at least one of the Sedakova poems was originally composed in 1980-81, which will of course be more important to some than to others.

[Laetitia · Rating 4 out of 5]

First of all: beautiful layout. Second: there are some beautiful poems in here. I'm a rather inexperienced poetry reader, so I felt that I wasn't able to understand/appreciate some of the poets enough ('I-know-this-is-probably-good-but-I-just-don't-really-feel-it/I-think-that's-because-it-goes-over-my-head'). I've experienced this nice little collection as a good introduction to some of the younger voices in Russian poetry, and I'm excited to read more work by some of them.

[F Gato]

It’s from Alla Gorbunova’s It’s the End of the World, My Love which is not listed on GR.

“Animals carry within themselves a memory of Heaven. We recognized Heaven in them and remember the way we were before the fall… Animals fell because of man, they followed man into the fallen world. If man can be saved, the animals will be saved, too, everything will saved.”

[Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

This isn't actually the book I read, but I'm trying to keep my count accurate. The book I read by this author was It's the End of the World, My Love. I have no idea how to add a book here.