"Lavishly mordant, magically bitter, erotically sardonic, the poems of This Lamentable City plant themselves on the far side of history's hopelessness, where sometimes even a trace of love
springs. Ilya Kaminsky's free translations are a live-wire joy to read."---Alicia Ostriker
"Polina Barskova's work emerges from an intelligence and a sensibility in which poetry matters, and not only to poets. These poems arise from a confluence of history and lyric:...fraught with
danger but vibrant with inquiry. Ilya Kaminsky and his collaborators have created taut, lively translations that earn their place as poems in English."---Marilyn Hacker
"Barskova is an elegiac poet who brings to her American readers a language formally inventive, worldly and humorous. One of her strengths is her ability to bring together strikingly erotic,
sensual images...with a deep sense of history and culture...In Russian, Barskova is a master of meter, rhyme, and alliteration, and...(w)hat comes across in English is the tonality of the
poems, the clarity of her vocal play and images, her intricacy of address."---Ilya Kaminsky, From His Introduction to this Lamentable City
"Barskova's poetry harbors that rarest of combinations: at once edgy, ironic, obviously modern...and classic, genuflecting to absolutely traditional Russian poetic mores and obsessions. The
images are new, fresh, and even startling, but the rhythmic and sonic patterns have a reassuring aesthetic wisdom. I was utterly taken with these poems."---Dr. Ivonne H. Howell, Russian and
International Studies, University of Richmond
In her homeland of Russia, Polina Barskova is considered one of the most accomplished and daring of the younger poets. Born in 1976 in Leningrad---now called St. Petersburg, as before - she
began publishing poems in journals at age nine and released the first of her six books as a teenager. She came to the United States at the age of twenty to pursue a Ph.D. at the University of
California, Berkeley, having already earned a graduate degree in classical literature at the state university in St. Petersburg. Barskova now teaches at Hampshire College in Amherst,
Massachusetts. This is the first book of her poems to be published in English translation. Editor and translator Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, Ukraine, and is author of a bestselling book
of poems, Dancing in Odessa (Tupelo, 2004), and co-editor of The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (HarperCollins, 2010). He teaches at San Diego State University and the New England
College MFA Program in Poetry.
