Gogol in Rome (Salt Modern Poets) - Softcover

Kapovich, Katia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1844710467 ISBN 13: 9781844710461

Publisher: Salt, 2004

Synopsis

Shortlisted for The Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize

Katia Kapovich’s poems embody a personal kind of lyricism. Often focused on specifics of locality and displacement, alienation and marginality, they remodel the actual and infuse poetic thought with a dual sense of time, where the past and the present live simultaneously. Here is a gallery of narrative portraits that are both unheroic and unforgettable – deaf and mute children, laundering women, Moldovan homosexuals, beggars, pickpockets, mental patients, black-marketeers, peasants, troubled teens, unknown artists, Israeli Bedouins, Russian draftees, Soviet boy scouts, political convicts … Kapovich’s characters are at home in Dostoyevskian, borderline worlds. Combining the polyphony of their voices into the registers of her own, different voice, the poet documents the great beauty that can sometimes emerge out of marginalized existence.

About this title

About the Author

Katia Kapovich is a bilingual poet writing in English and Russian. She is the author of five collections of Russian verse and of a book of English language poetry, Gogol in Rome (Salt, 2004), shortlisted for the Jerwood Alderburgh Prize 2005 in England. Her English poems have also appeared in the London Review of Books, The New Republic, The Independent, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, The American Scholar, The Antioch Review, Jacket, and numerous other periodicals. She received the 2001 Witter Bynner Fellowship from the US Library of Congress. In 2007 she will be Poet-in-Residence at Amherst College. Kapovich lives in Cambridge, MA, where she co-edits Fulcrum: an annual of poetry and aesthetics.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Apartment 75

The obese woman who used to wake up

our whole house by starting her Subaru at 6 a.m.

has committed suicide. Snow

hangs like a set of unlaundered sheets

in the windows. When I walked into

her seventh floor studio, the standard lamp

was still on, but could only light itself,

refusing to interfere with the dull dusk

of the interior the police had already searched.

For the first time, I felt an urge to look at her face

and perhaps to see something more distinctly

than the triviality of neighborhood permits

and the mystery of suicide allows,

but her features were shut down without offense.

I only remember a chair missing its rear legs,

shoved up against the wall for balance.

Edition details

• Publisher: Salt
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1844710467
• ISBN 13: 9781844710461
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 112