cover image As It Turned Out

As It Turned Out

Dmitri Golynko, , trans. from the Russian by Eugene Ostashevsky with Rebecca Bella and Simona Sc. Ugly Duckling, $15 (0pp) ISBN 978-1-933254-36-4

In Golynko, Russian poetry has produced a Language poet who utilizes post-Soviet, reconstructed, contemporary Russia as fodder to build poems that operate like postmodern linguistic games: “elementary things/ don’t take up a lot of space/ that must be the formula of modernity.” This first collection in English spans 15 years during which Golynko crafted an increasingly unornamented verse, replacing absurd linguistic playfulness (“lobster, Chianti,/rare beefstext” with vulgarity and an atmosphere of haplessness in jerky, associative poems and sequences: “whip out, yeah, eat it up.” The book begins with faux European narratives such as “Sashenka” (“I stole gooseberries, crowfoots in the municipal gardens of Tartu”), moves to a series of emotionally loaded list poems called “The Revered Categories” and finally merges the two forms to create the title poem , a bleak narrative of despair and loneliness with occasional sparks of dark humor: “men occupied with the quest for fire/ generally pay no attention to women.” Wildly experimental in the original Russian, this book was no doubt difficult to translate, and some of its force may have been lost in the process, but fans of experimental and Eastern European poetry may find much to like. (Nov.)