In distinct voices and styles, the poets in This Is Us Losing Count reckon with the weight of the past, as memories in the form of household objects, buildings, specters, and meals accumulate on the page. Ekaterina Simonova details a grandmother’s end-of-life visions; her final days are spent convening with her dead loved ones, whispering and laughing, happy to be reunited. In insatiable verse, Galina Rymbu assembles a feast of breads, dumplings, sweets, and other snacks, declaring “I write because I can’t eat enough.” And Alla Gorbunova 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 be lost to time.
With this fifth installment of Two Lines Press’s Calico Series, it’s clear that Russian poetry is in the midst of a new golden era. In language that shimmers with life, this new generation of poets demonstrates a refusal to accept the structural or moralizing conventions of the past. Instead, they ask us to give ourselves over to poetry as we would a memory, letting it wash over us.