Dmitry Golynko’s first English-language release, As It Turned Out, features both earlier and more current poetry, drawing on the author’s three books as well as internet and unpublished materials.
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Hold it! How have we arrived at such a moment that could produce Dmitry Golynko’s poetry? How has Soviet history remade itself, faster than dial-up, in the years that lead up to these wide open poems that document the very public culture it runs with? These darkly familiar serial poems cash-in the bankruptcy of the personal sentiment for the public outcry: “chows down museli, pricey sashimi/cheap dried apricots/a mid-level manager adjusts his slacks.” Who knew? Indeed, this is how it is, As It Turns Out. (P.S. It’s impossible not to think about the superb translations that grace each of Golynko’s lines. It is fitting, in a poetry that is so public and so purloined, that the translators’ own contributions would be so deeply intertwined with the original.)

—Robert Fitterman

Sometimes life can feel a little too lived. Witness here the "shampooski," the "the halfwit toastmaster," the "déjà vengeance." Golynko not only takes on, but takes in, this problem, as he responds to a variety of Russias—whether the lush monumentality or the ornate quotidian, his vocabularies mirror while evolving, resemble while describing. As It Turned Out then, is decadent, that decadence which resides in our grammars, our definitions, which represents, here, "the rot spread" of 15 years of lyricisms: "just like that yeah"—"the perfect shape of the breast." This book will leave you disheveled. Sincerely so.

—Rod Smith

Dmitry Golynko, born in 1969 in Leningrad, is one of the most innovative poets in Russia today, employing his poetry to examine the relationship between post-Soviet language, culture and society. The author of three books of poems — Homo Scribens, Directory and Concrete Doves — Golynko has been nominated for the Andrey Bely Prize. His poetry has been translated into several European languages. In his parallel career as a cultural critic, he defended a pioneering PhD dissertation on the Russian post-avant-garde a nd regularly publishes essays on contemporary art and cinema. After a teaching stint in South Korea and a fellowship at the Literarischer Colloqium Berlin, he is again living in Saint Petersburg.

Eugene Ostashevsky is a Russian-born American poet and translator. Apart from books of poetry published with Ugly Duckling Presse, he also edited and co-translated OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism (Nortwestern University Press), containing work by Alexander Vvedensky, Daniil Kharms, and others. Rebecca Bella was born in Boston, studied Russian at Brown University, and pursued a Fulbright Fellowship in translation in St. Petersburg, Russia. Her poems and translations have appeared in The Oregon Literary Review, A Public Space and The St. Petersburg Review. She lives and teaches in San Francisco. Simona Schneider is a writer and translator whose work has been published in The New Yorker, The Brooklyn Rail, A Public Space, The Modern Review and elsewhere. She has contributed translations to Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms (Overlook Press). She lives in Morocco.

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Translator's note:

Dmitry Golynko is one of the boldest linguistic innovators in Russian poetry today. A hard coming of age during the collapse of the Soviet system sensitized his ear to how language mutates in response to political and social change. The multilevel puns that saturated his writing in the 1990s fused the brand-consciousness of mass-market culture with recondite play of literary allusions. Covered in such puns and psychologically stylized, his narratives exuded the sense of unreality of life so characteristic of the Yeltsin era. His dandyism offered a postmodern update to the poetic traditions of his native city, St. Petersburg. In the 2000s, Golynko abandoned his old manner for one that is radically naturalistic. His new obsession with documenting how regular Russians speak and think leads him to appropriate the latest from the most varied linguistic strata: bureaucrat-ese, mafia slang, blogspeak, technical jargon, teenage cant. His replacement of authorial self with found expressions, and of narrative with seriality, aids to generate texts whose apparent soullessness is in fact infused with real emotion. Particularly attuned to how language encodes power relations, Golynko creates a portrait of contemporary Russian life that is as darkly unsentimental as it is surgically precise.

—Eugene Ostashevsky