My Soviet Union: Poems

by Michael Dumanis

The speaker of the simultaneously funny and devastating poems in this remarkable first collection comes from a country that, like the Soviet Union, no longer exists, a place he treats with a mixture of nostalgia, disdain, and bewilderment as he strives to achieve a sense of order in his current disordered environment, a post-apocalyptic landscape with striking similarities to our own. He takes the reader through haunting and disjunctive childhood memories, on visits to Azerbaijan and West Des Moines, through the ravages of physical and spiritual illness, into and out of wars and ill-fated romantic escapades, as he carefully pieces together a complex narrative of self.This is a book of location and dis-location, intent and inaction, struggle and failure, restraint and mania, love and anger, savagery and healing, grief and merriment, elegy and ode. Technically, the poems-often litanies-are marked by syntactical variation, recurring imagery, paradoxical statement, cultural idioms, shifts between high and low diction, a carnivalesque sense of humor, and an elliptical approach to exposition. The speaker also takes on the identities of various personae in the book, including Joseph Cornell, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Pol Pot, a vaudevillian, a movie extra, minor dictators, vagrants, ambigendered lovers, and a lighthouse keeper on an uninhabited island.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2007

About the author

Michael Dumanis is the author of two books of poems, Creature (Four Way Books, 2023) and My Soviet Union (University of Massachusetts Press), winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry; and the co-editor of the anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande). Born in the former Soviet Union, he emigrated to the United States at the age of five. His recent work appears in American Poetry Review, The Believer, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Colorado Review, The Common, Iowa Review, Poetry, and Waxwing. He lives in North Bennington, Vermont, and teaches at Bennington College, where he also serves as editor of Bennington Review.

Reviews

[Talia · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was great; with 81 pages there's nearly something for everyone. A few poems were a bit too "out there" for me, sort of lide writing exercises with their very Gertrude Stein-like ranting, but parts 3 and 4 are incredible.

[Flora · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The Woods Are Burning," in particular, is chillingly brilliant.

[Joe]

Felt real keyed into how the poems move. There are beautiful turns, transformations in image and the line--

Imagine our relief, our disappointment,
when someone told us the grenade
we had discovered, the grenade
we took delight in kicking to each other,
was just a clump of night or else some earth
or just a heart or else
some lesser organ.

Appreciated also the urgency in some of the poems, their capacity to enact a less than tranquil, charged mode of thought--

When she said she would rather cut
what was intimate out of her, out of her skin,
out of the frame she was in, cut it out,

her involvement with him, like a tumor,
when she said she would rather kill,
if not for shame, herself, than stay beside,

through the continuance on one damp sheet
of one more night, him, that she'd rather die
than lay her shopworn body next to his again...

Though I felt some poems sacrificed integrity of meaning for a charged and momentarily satisfying BIG POETIC last line like:

"I rest a pistol on my temple. Fire."

or

"prayer for sound."

or

"with extravagant wings"

Still, if he wrote another book, I'd read it.

Read: "The Bouvet Oya Lighthouse," "Cancer Is A Disease of Animals," "Banishment"

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

The second, long poem, "The Woods Are Burning" is awesome, bardic, original. The rest of the collection has some very strong spots, but nothing completely compares to that thrilling intensity. You may be able to access "The Woods Are Burning" through Google Books here: http://books.google.com/books?id=sQJU...

[Ruth]

just added this to my Amazon wishlist

[Cassa · Rating 1 out of 5]

Read for class; found it jumpy and uninteresting.

[Jade Bragg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Michael Dumanis is definitely my favorite contemporary poet. His voice cuts so deep and his language is beautiful. My copy is worn out from flipping through it so much.

[hh · Rating 4 out of 5]

musical