Book record
Elementary Poetry
Andrei Monastyrski, Brian Droitcour
Translated from Russian by Yelena Kalinsky
Elementary Poetry is a Russian multi-author or collaborative poetry volume from Russia, associated with Andrei Monastyrski, Brian Droitcour, translated by Yelena Kalinsky, and published by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2019. It is a Russian conceptual or collaborative volume that treats poetic basics as experiment rather than simplicity. The word elementary feels sly here, as though the book is asking what a poem becomes when its smallest units are rearranged. I would not ask the reader to solve this book before feeling it. The better invitation is to start with the image that will not quite explain itself, then follow the pressure of cadence, silence, and address. For this library, the book matters as more than a representative entry from Russia. It gives English-language readers another route into how poetry travels: not as a tidy report from elsewhere, but as a living encounter with local weather, historical pressure, and the privacy of a voice.
- Published
- 2019
- Publisher
- Ugly Duckling Presse
- Language
- Russian
- Country
- Russia
- ISBN
- 9781937027681