Irene Riz

Born and raised by Russian novels, mildly nostalgic for the Silver Age of Russian poetry, with a haiku for a heart, I am still a human being. I worked for years in cancer research, had two children, rock climbed and hiked. I read long novels in the hammock and love to wear silky scarves.

English, the global language of now, is my first choice: a language of action with more verbs and shorter words than Russian. From Pasternak and Akhmatova, through bilingual Nabokov and Brodsky, to the wide spectrum of American English — Plath and Eliot, Frost and Bukowski, Limón and Kooser — translated Scandinavian, Indian, French, Spanish, and Persian, I am ready to read extraterrestrial poetry.

Sometimes, when I think between languages, I make up new words. "Gleamts" is one of them and is the title of my first collection of poems. Follow me for more.