There has been no anthology in English dedicated to the poetics of the great generation of Russian modernists. For a group of poets so widely admired, relatively little seems known about their philosophy of poetry and their poetic influences, and although there is tremendous aesthetic diversity in this group, they have more in common than many readers assume. Russian poetry was a small world, made even smaller by the arrests, disappearances, pogroms, famines, assassinations, and political conflagration of the revolutionary era, and literary differences were often overcome by a mutual sense of historic cataclysm. This anthology’s structure is like textile, with many common threads intertwining, doubling back, sometimes unraveling—creating a matrix of poetic conversation: Mayakovsky on Khlebnikov, Pasternak on Mayakovsky, Tsvetaeva on Pasternak, Brodsky on Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova on Mandelstam. Shared themes range from expected (the word) to serendipitous (the ocean). Above all these poets are obsessed with proximity—to God, to nature and place, to poetic predecessors, to language (their own and others), and always, forever, to the inexpressible.

Katie Farris is the author of boysgirls (Marick, 2011), which combines prose poetry, fairy tale, riddle, myth, and drawings. She has contributed translations to books of Russian, French, and Chinese poetry, including This Lamentable City (Tupelo, 2010) and New Cathay (Tupelo, 2013). She currently teaches in the MFA program at San Diego State University and in New England College’s low-residency MFA program. Ilya KaminskyIlya Kaminsky is author of Dancing in Odessa (Tupelo, 2004) and co-editor of The Ecco Book of International Poetry (2010) and editor of This Lamentable City: Poems of Polina Barskova (Tupelo, 2010). He teaches at San Diego State University and in the New England College M.F.A. Program. He lives in San Diego, California. Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, former Soviet Union in 1977, and is now widely regarded as the most exciting young poet in America. In 1993, his family received asylum from the American government and came to the United States. Ilya received his BA from Georgetown University and subsequently became the youngest person ever to serve as George Bennet Fellow Writer in Residence at Phillips Exeter Academy. Dancing in Odessa is his first full length book. In 2005 alone, Ilya Kaminsky won Whiting Prize, the 2005 Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the 2005 Foreword Poetry Book of the Year award. Valzhyna Mort, born in Minsk, Belarus, has published two poetry collections in English, Factory of Tears and Collected Body(both Copper Canyon, 2008 and 2012). Awarded a Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship and Poetry magazine’s Bess Hokin Prize, she now teaches at Cornell University.