Tupelo Press

(Available in March 2010)

Publication Date:
March 2010
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Format:
Paperback Original

ISBN:
978-1-932195-83-5

Price: $11.95

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Polina Barskova’s poems are a zesty paradoxical concoction: bawdy and erudite, elegant and raw, subtle and brazen. As Ilya Kaminsky attests in his introduction to This Lamentable City, “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.” Though her prize-winning books of poetry in Russian have earned an international reputation, and individual poems have appeared in prestigious journals and anthologies — for instance, in Contemporary Russian Poetry (Dalkey Archive, 2008) and An Anthology of Contemporary Russian Women Poets (Iowa, 2005) — this is the first book of Barskova’s poems to be published in translation, in a handsome dual-language edition.

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Polina Barskova

In her homeland of Russia, Polina Barskova is considered a prodigy, 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 lives in Massachusetts and teaches at Hampshire College.

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Ilya Kaminsky

Poet Ilya Kaminsky is an especially fortuitous translator for Barskova. Also born in Russia, he is the author of an acclaimed book of poems in English, Dancing in Odessa (Tupelo, 2004), and he teaches writing and literature at San Diego State University. He is also co-editor of The Ecco Book of International Poetry, due in 2010.

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(Available in April 2010)

Publication Date:
April 2010
Pre-order Now

Format:
Paperback Original

ISBN:
978-1-932195-84-2

Price: $16.95

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Gary Soto’s poems are fast, funny, heartrending, and achingly believable, like Polaroid love letters, or snatches of music heard out of a passing car; patches of beauty like patches of sunlight; the very pulse of a life.

—Joyce Carol Oates

I read Gary Soto’s poems with delight. There’s no one I know, certainly in this language, who writes like him. For me, his is a deeply important poetry.

—Gerald Stern

Soto may be the most exciting poet of poverty in America to emerge since James Wright and Philip Levine.

—Poetry

Gary Soto is a consummate storyteller . . . intelligent, funny, and bitingly honest. He is also a craftsman, a master of metaphor and simile, his language capable of dazzling somersaults. Gary Soto’s poems should be required reading in MFA programs and migrant labor camps. He’s that good.

—Martín Espada

Gary Soto’s eleventh book of poems for adults, Human Nature is full of arresting images and surprising scenarios — and probably more uncanny opening lines than in any book you’ll read all year. These poems pretend to be “simple” portraits of remembered youth and of life at the other end, where a man is walking into old age. Yet their surface transparency gives way to burrowing (often troubling) insights. Over and over he finds arresting, surprising cause for pausing and looking further, deeper, in the motley comedy of street life and family life and the erotic realm of memory. There is comedy on almost every page, but also the sadness of perceived futility. As a poet, Soto’s characteristic vantage is bemused and amused, both. He has long been praised for his rich descriptions and strange imaginative leaps; he is well known for poems of childhood that are really open and exposed, and his work has connected powerfully with teenaged readers and their teachers. New in Human Nature are the bittersweet poems of aging, as an artist wonders aloud how something as quiet and delicate as a poem can hold its own in the raucous, rude, careening mayhem of our national public life. What should a poet do? Keep singing, of course. The muse must be given homage, no matter how worn out she looks. And even in his bruised uncertainty, Soto always brings a distinctive verbal mischief and descriptive beauty to the task of praising our not always very pretty world.

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Gary Soto

Gary Soto is a “multi-instrumentalist,” lauded with praise for his prose and poetry and one of America’s most prolific authors. Poet, memoirist, Young Adult and children’s novelist, and biographer, Gary Soto has also published thirty-five books, including ten previous poetry collections for adults, notably New and Selected Poems (Chronicle, 1995), finalist for both the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the National Book Award. Soto has been featured as NBC Television’s Person-of-the-Week, and among his dozens of accolades are the Literature Award from the Hispanic Heritage Foundation, the Author-Illustrator Civil Rights Award from the National Education Association, and the PEN Center West Book Award. Soto lives in Berkeley and Fresno, California.

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