I cannot swim across the tartar desert
of the morning grown vast
the bed that washed in with the maid of light in tatters
nor nurse the air hole
escape neither decomposition nor denigration
bareheaded I’ll not run into the grassy temple
my eyelymphs won’t unlock binoculars
where the recorder of the heart batters the forehead
and there in shreds of battered head or sky
at the height of the wandering seed
immaculate non-conception
Red Shifting
Aleksandr Skidan
Translated by Genya Turovskaya
January 2008
To disappear into these beautiful, wrecked songs...is a singular, moving experience.
Christian Hawkey
“Anyone interested in the vital pulse of contemporary Russian poetry will be richly rewarded by this expertly translated selection of Aleksandr Skidan’s work. It is visionary and transgressive, erotic and Corybantic, ancient and immediate, and ‘it strikes suddenly/like a crooked needle in the heart.'” —Michael Palmer
Eastern European Poets Series #16.
About the Author
Aleksandr Skidan, born in Leningrad in 1965, has published five poetry collections in Russian, one of which was awarded the 2006 Andrei Bely Prize. An award-winning essayist, Skidan has published four books of essays (Critical Mass, The Resistance to/of Poetry, Summation of a Poetics, and Theses Toward the Politicization of Art and Other Texts), as well as a novel. He translates American and European literary theory and American poetry. He is a member of the art and activist collective Chto Delat? and a co-editor of the New Literary Observer. His first book in English translation, Red Shifting, was published in 2008 by Ugly Duckling Presse. In 2018, he was awarded the Joseph Brodsky Memorial Fellowship in poetry and spent the fall in Rome and Venice. He lives in St. Petersburg.
Praise
To read a book this fierce, this honest, to disappear into these beautiful, wrecked songs—and to disappear 'more fully' precisely because they question 'the idea of the wrecked song'—is a singular, moving experience. The poems in Red Shifting, translated beautifully by Genya Turovskaya, display a near-physical, wounding intelligence, an intelligence unflinchingly aware of what it means to think history's recklessness.
Christian Hawkey
About the Translator
Genya Turovskaya is a poet, translator, and psychotherapist. She is the author of The Breathing Body Of This Thought (Black Square Editions), as well as the chapbooks Calendar (UDP), The Tides (Octopus Books), New Year’s Day (Octopus Books), and Dear Jenny (Supermachine). Her poetry and translations of contemporary Russian poets have appeared in A Public Space, Asymptote, Chicago Review, Conjunctions, Fence, jubilat, Octopus, PEN Poetry, Sangam Poetry, Seedings, The Elephants, and other publications. She is the translator of Aleksandr Skidan’s Red Shifting (UDP) and co-translator of Arkadii Dragomoshchenko’s Endarkenment: Selected Poems (Wesleyan).
In the News
Links
Other UDP titles from Aleksandr Skidan here.
Aleksandr Skidan: Two films, two poems, and an interview, featured on Jacket2
Publication Details
ISBN: 978-1-933254-33-3
Trade Paperback
Perfect-bound. 175 pp, 5.5 x 8 in
Publication Date: January 01 2008
Series: Eastern European Poets Series #16