Born in 1947, Lev Rubinstein was a major figure of Moscow Conceptualism and the unofficial Soviet art scene of the 1970s and 1980s. While working as a librarian, he began using catalogue cards to write sequential texts. He described his “note-card poems,” as a “hybrid genre” that “slides along the edges of genres and, like a small mirror, fleetingly reflects each of them, without identifying with any of them.” His work was circulated through samizdat and underground readings in the “unofficial” art scene of the sixties and seventies, finding wide publication only after the late 1980s. Now among Russia’s most well-known living poets, Rubinstein lives in Moscow and writes cultural criticism for the independent media. His books in English translation include Here I Am (Glas, 2001), Catalogue of Comedic Novelties (UDP, 2004), and Thirty-Five New Pages (UDP, 2011). In Compleat Catalogue of Comedic Novelties (UDP, 2014), his note-card poems appear in their entirety for the first time.

Philip Metres is the author of ten books, including Instants (UDP), Shrapnel Maps (forthcoming), the essay collection The Sound of Listening, the poetry books Sand Opera and Pictures at an Exhibition, and a translated collection of Arseny Tarkovsky’s poetry, I Burned at the Feast. His work has garnered a Lannan fellowship, two NEAs, six Ohio Arts Council Grants, and more. He is professor of English and director of the Peace, Justice, and Human Rights program at John Carroll University.

Tatiana Tulchinsky has translated many works of fiction, poetry, drama and non-fiction, among them, Anna Politkovskaya’s A Small Corner of Hell, An Anthology of Russian Verse, and The Selected Works of Venedict Erofeev. In 1998, she was awarded the AATSEEL Prize for Best Translation from a Slavic or East European Language for her work with Marvin Kantor on Leo Tolstoy’s Plays in Three Volumes (Northwestern University Press). She is the recipient of a Witter-Bynner Foundation for Poetry Grant, and a Creative Writing Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Currently, she is translating and promoting English-language drama for the Russian stage.