This Is Us Losing Count

In This Is Us Losing Count, eight contemporary Russian poets obliterate old conventions in their efforts to reckon with the past. Here memories take the form of housewares, specters, city streets, and even foods that can weigh down, haunt, disorient, and bloat but never quite sate us. Alla Gorbunova (translated by Elina Alter) surveys a changing city from her self-described “cloud tower,” recalling where buildings used to stand, and through this double vision of past and present she unspools the small but extraordinary details that might otherwise have been lost to time. Ekaterina Simonova (translated by Il’ia Karagulin) dwells in her dying grandmother’s hallucinatory final days, spent convening with deceased friends and relatives, visible only to her. And Galina Rymbu (translated by Eugene Ostashevsky) assembles a feast of breads, dumplings, sweets, and other snacks, declaring “I write because I can’t eat enough.” In sinuous translations of verse both irreverent and sentimental, this fifth installment of Two Lines Press’s Calico Series asks to what extent we must remember in order to reinvent.