“Whereas Bilotserkivets speaks of the immediacy of survival,–what do I and You have to do in order to get beyond this current or recently passed stage of destruction and horror–Shuvalova picks up with the implicit question of how are you acting to remember that this is not something that just passes for everybody, that in order to read about these horrors they must be experienced by real, living countries.” -Cody Stetzel
Just tell me who the hell am I?
What powers did I, do I hold?
We are puppets, all parts of us
connected by strings, by loose wishes
Wind and darkness, like the cuckoo
Who returns from far off lands
I hear them singing a new song.
They hear each other sing . . .
The voices to which Barskova has turned her obsessive, greedy, undeceived attention in Air Raid are not easy voices to listen to, but they are voices she is rescuing even as her poetry . . . is rescuing her, line by line.
“No matter how far you stray, your origin beckons you.”
“What’re they selling there?”
“What we already have.”
On translating Green Mountain by Chinese Poet Yang Jian
when it pierces my skin
I tremble without panic
