You're not going to find too many poetry collections that are this action-packed.
Cathy Park Hong
Eugene Ostashevsky (Leningrad, 1968) grew up in New York and lives in Berlin. His latest chapbook is The Feeling Sonnets (Clinic Publishing). His latest full-length book of poetry, The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi (NYRB), discusses migration, translation, and second-language writing as practiced by pirates and parrots. Translated into German by Uljana Wolf and Monika Rink as Der Pirat, der von Pi den Wert nicht kennt, it won the 2019 International Poetry Prize of the City of Muenster, and was the pretext of a mini-opera by Lucia Ronchetti at the Venice Biennale. His previous books include The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza (UDP) and Iterature (UDP). As translator from Russian, he works primarily with OBERIU, the 1920s-1930s underground circle led by Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky. He has edited the first English-language collection of their writings, called OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism (Northwestern). His collection of Alexander Vvedensky’s poetry, An Invitation for Me to Think (NYRB), with contributions by Matvei Yankelevich, won the 2014 National Translation Award from the American Literary Translators Association. He is currently preparing, with Daniel Mellis, an edition of Tango with Cows, a 1913 book of visual poetry by the Russian Futurist Vasily Kamensky, which is forthcoming from UDP in 2021. He also edited and co-translated collections by the contemporary Russian poets Dmitry Golynko, As It Turned Out (UDP), and Arkadii Dragomoshchenko’s Endarkenment: Selected Poems (Wesleyan).
Superhero philosophers and monsters made of math. Epistemology, logic, and the limits of language; meaninglessness, irony and hope. This is deeply serious, and very funny, stuff.
Nicole Krauss
If you haven't yet met Eugene Ostashevsky's alter ego, that New Philosopher DJ Spinoza, you have a delightful treat in store. These multi-layered lyric/narrative poems are zany, profound, hilarious, imaginative, and technically brilliant (what with their rhyming, echolalia, sound play). Ostashevsky is the true heir, not only of the Oberiu poets whom he has translated so brilliantly, but also of Gogol. He understands that today it is more imperative than ever to know 'how to tell the truth / and why.'
Marjorie Perloff
The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza is a lovable little book.
Bookslut
Perhaps the most irreverent literary use that has been made of Spinoza is to be found in the poetry of Eugene Ostashevsky [...] Ostashevsky suffers under no exaggerated respect for the life of the mind, or that, at least, is the pose of the poems, which are also crammed with erudition. The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza [...] is a playful, punning poetical lollapalooza [...] The poems delight in mixing highbrow and infra-lowbrow, mathematical equations squatting in the midst of bad rapper’s rhymes, the cackling irreverence mocking pretensions of reason’s lofty isolation. Ostashevsky, one can be sure, is aware of the paradoxes his poetry subtends. The poet is as driven to take on the world by “using the word” (as Borges had put it in “Baruch Spinoza”) as is any philosopher. This is especially apparent when it is such a word-giddy poet as Ostashevsky. His fiercely cerebral constructions rage against reason’s hegemony, and Spinoza, with a certain appropriateness, takes the brunt.
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Oxford Handbook of Spinoza
More UDP titles from Eugene Ostashevsky here
Video of reading of DJ Spinoza in Berkeley
ISBN: 978-1-933254-44-9
Trade Paperback
Smyth-sewn. 128 pp, 4.75 x 7 in
Publication Date: November 10 2008
Distribution: SPD
Series: Eastern European Poets Series #23