Notes of the Phantom Woman
Notes of the Phantom Woman
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About the Book
With a near-compulsive insistence, Notes of the Phantom Woman addresses the question of what reality is and how we construct it. Ranging in subject from the presence of pigeons in the city, the dead ends of logic, how geological time becomes personal, and the boundary between statistics and Hell, the poems are connected by a rigorous inquiry into the illusions of thinking, the blind spots of utopianism, and the trouble with moral positioning. Results of such a task are—predictably—unpredictable; a healthy dose of black humor helps the poetry go down.
Author
Iana Boukova
Iana Boukova is a Bulgarian poet and writer. She is the author of four poetry books, two short story collections, and the novel Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow, which is forthcoming from New York Review Books in 2026. Her poetry collection Notes of the Phantom Woman was published in 2018 and received the National Award for most outstanding book of Bulgarian poetry. A Greek-language version of it was also published in Athens simultaneously under the title Drapetomania. English translations of her work have appeared in Best European Fiction 2017, Words Without Borders, Two Lines, Absinthe, The Southern Review, and Exchanges among others. She lives between Sofia and Athens, where she is an editor on the board of the influential Greek poetry magazine FRMK.
Translators
John O’Kane
John O’Kane was born in New York City in 1940, majored in Classical Studies at Princeton University, then went on to do graduate work in Arabic and Persian at the American University in Cairo and the University of Tehran. As an independent scholar and specialist in medieval Sufism, he has translated eight volumes from Arabic and Persian, as well as five academic works from German that deal withIslamic history, mysticism, and Classical Persian poetry. For over fifty years he has been living between Amsterdam and the South of France with regular visits to Athens. In recent years he has become interested in modern Greek poetry and working closely with contemporary poets in Greece.
Ekaterina Petrova
Ekaterina Petrova is a literary translator and a bilingual (English/Bulgarian) nonfiction writer, currently based in Sofia. She holds an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa, where she was awarded the Iowa Arts Fellowship. Her literary translations and nonfiction writing have appeared in various Bulgarian and English-language publications, including Asymptote, Words Without Borders, European Literature Network, EuropeNow, The Southern Review, and Reading in Translation. Her translation of Iana Boukova’s novel Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow, which received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant, is forthcoming from New York Review Books in 2026.
Praise
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Excerpt
(Wherever I go, I find meanings, just like wherever Poirot goes, murders take place.) Contact with reality produces a lot of movement. Or, as one of my friends puts it: they hit one another because they like touching each other. The sky—as Kepler discovered— is not a dome; it’s a siege. His noetic onion of perfect Platonic solids collapsed. It came to be mathematically proven that every orbit possesses two centers, and one of them is emptiness. (Kepler displayed amazing sangfroid for someone whose mother was almost burned at the stake as a witch.) Only much, much later, there appeared the science of economics, according to which the unlimited reproduction of archetypes leads to their inevitable devaluation. Hence terms emerge such as “light pollution.” (And each time it’s in a new way inauspicious when people suddenly stop what they’re doing and look up at the sky.)