Author’s Prayer – Broadside

A gorgeous, limited edition, dual-language (English & Russian) broadside of Ilya Kaminsky’s “Author’s Prayer,” (translated by Polina Barskova) from Dancing in Odessa.

Each numbered broadside has been printed by hand on Rives Heavyweight, a French mould-made 100% cotton paper. Typesetting, woodcut, and printing by Josef Beery in Free Union, Virginia, January 2011.

Like Joseph Brodsky before him, Kaminsky is a terrifyingly good poet, another poet from the former U.S.S.R. who, having adopted English, has come to put us native speakers to shame… It seemed to take about five minutes to read this book, and when I began again, I reached the end before I was ready. That’s how compulsive, how propulsive it is to read. It wraps you in a world created by a new and wonderful poet.

—The Philadelphia Inquirer

Click to hear Ilya Kaminksy’s reading of “Author’s Prayer” from the terrific website of “From the Fishouse,” a nonprofit that promotes the aural tradition of poetry.