On Gala Mukomolova's Without Protection

Laura Eve Engel reviews poet Gala Mukomolova's first collection, Without Protection (Coffee House), out this week. "Mukomolova builds a new mythology on the bones of the old with breathless momentum, until our speaker and her heroine merge into one, and then transform," writes Engel at the Academy of American Poets. More:

...For a Russian immigrant, a queer woman, and a mind apart, creating a mythology in which one sees oneself is a radical act of alchemy, of creating space where once there was none: “I was small. I built a self outside my self because a child needs shelter. // Not even you knew I was strange, / I ate the food my family ate, I answered to my name.” Mukomolova is attentive to the erotic to the point of devotion, figuring sex not as symbol or sublimation; rather, a proving ground for the possibility that we might all be carrying in our most unprotected selves, a new story worth making space for: “[Y]ou like it and that / makes me like it. / All of a sudden / nothing / is not beautiful.”

Read the full review, and a poem from the book, here.