This lamentable city by Polina Barskova and translated by Ilya Kaminsky

This is poetry from Russia.

This lamentable city by Polina Barskova translated by Ilya Kaminsky is published by Tupelo Press. This is a Book originally written in Russian. This was published in 2010.0 and has the ISBN of 9.781932195835E12.

This lamentable city, by Polina Barskova, is a Russian poetry collection from Russia, translated by Ilya Kaminsky, published by Tupelo Press in 2010. It is a Russian collection by Polina Barskova where urban ruin, grief, and historical imagination meet. The city is lamentable not only because it has suffered, but because it keeps asking language to account for suffering. 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.

If you’d like to see international poetry continue and gain traction, consider requesting this work from your local library, or purchasing it from places like Open Books (a poetry only bookstore), Asterism Books (an independent press distributor), or bookshop.org to connect you with your local bookstores.

Check out more of the always in-progress translated poetry index here.