Red Shifting

Aleksandr Skidan is one of Russia’s most important contemporary poets. With language that is at once literary, cinematic, philosophical, journalistic, his innovative writing calls into question the distinction between poetry and philosophy. Skidan blurs and shifts the boundaries between the two as literary genres and as modes of discourse. His poetry is both lyrical and disjointed, addressing unflinchingly the literary and historical condition of post-Soviet Russia, engaging in continuous discourse with what Walter Benjamin would call the origins of the present crisis.

Genya Turovskaya was born in Kiev, Ukraine, and grew up in New York City. She is the author of two chapbooks, Calendar (Ugly Duckling Presse) and The Tides (Octopus Books). Her poetry and translations from Russian have appeared in numerous publications including Chicago Review, Conjunctions, Aufgabe, and jubilat. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

"To read a book this fierce, this honest, to disappear into these beautiful, wrecked songs—and to disappear 'more fully' precisely because they question 'the idea of the wrecked song'—is a singular, moving experience. The poems in Red Shifting, translated beautifully by Genya Turovskaya, display a near-physical, wounding intelligence, an intelligence unflinchingly aware of what it means to think history's recklessness." – Christian Hawkey

"Anyone interested in the vital pulse of contemporary Russian poetry will be richly rewarded by this expertly translated selection of Aleksandr Skidan's work. It is visionary and transgressive, erotic and Corybantic, ancient and immediate, and 'it strikes suddenly/like a crooked needle in the heart.' " – Michael Palmer