Through a dazzling variety of poetic forms and with genuine poetic courage, Polina Barskova—one of the best poets writing in Russian today—reenacts the Siege of Leningrad, tragic pages of Russian history, and the lives of her favorite poets, as well as her own life with its joys, pains, and dramas. Translated into English by Valzhyna Mort, a superb poet herself, Air Raid reaffirms the significance of poetry as the historical medium uniquely equipped to articulate painful historical experiences and intimately connect them with today's sensibilities.

Is this a poetics of history or memory or of the inability of our notions of history and memory to make any sense of the horror our species has created? Is this a poetics of scream or whisper, or a scream in whisper? Is it a poetics whose music is crisis or one that takes a crisis as its muse? All of this, I think. And much more. "This pebble here is a monument to someone," Barskova writes. Her poetics is multi-vocal, yes, she echoes the voices of victims, yes, she makes sure many other poets' lines resonate as her own pages turn, yes—and yet it is silence, at the core of her metaphysics, that moves me the most. It is her silence that knows the limits of any human response to horror, it is her silence that orchestrates melodies unheard. Not an easy thing to create, this silence. And Valzhyna Mort does that hardest of things—she translates it into American-English, thereby challenging our own American-English assumptions of what poetry is. This elegiac and terrifying book, so filled with voices' various rhythms, will stay in my memory as a moment of stillness, as when one comes from the crowded funeral and closes the door to sit alone in the room. This book casts a spell; it leaves me with an ornament of silences that emote—for, as Dickinson told us: after great pain, a formal feeling comes.

Air Raid is a study of human response to history; a light-catching collection that casts the minute and individual alongside the collective experience of survival and loss. It is a gift to have this polyphonic work of cultural legacy presented to English-speakers in such excellent translation.