Ian Dreiblatt Reviews Genya Turovskaya's The Breathing Body of This Thought for Music & Literature

Music & Literature's new issue features a review of Genya Turovskaya's much-anticipated first full-length, The Breathing Body of This Thought (Black Square Editions), in which the late Russian poet, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, "seems to preside ... as mentor, influence, and lodestar." More, from Ian Dreiblatt:

...Turovskaya has an almost preternatural ability to turn the activity of language onto language itself, revealing it as a restless totality of mutually contingent phenomena. Each word resonates over a vast undertone series, haunted by every possibility it suggests and forecloses.

One exemplary poem, dedicated to Dragomoshchenko, is called “Life on Mars (Another New Year’s Day).” It begins:

Words for the wind were filled with trees

I was filled with a feeling I couldn’t name

I knew I would never be seeing her again: the girl with the shy tuck to her head, in the folkloric embroidered dress

In the aftermath I found myself in the mirror of ambivalent desire

Stripped of all continuous nature

The first line here begins with a kind of inversion — we tend to think of wind filling the trees, not the other way around. But Turovskaya’s voice comes in from another direction: the wind, neither a thing nor a place, is the size of the air, and so really is filled with trees. And things are subtler still, because it’s not the actual wind we’re concerned with here, but words for the wind. Words, when we speak them, are made of breath, of wind. And our lungs are full of trees, or at least arboreal little tubes — but neither these nor the fleeting congealment of sound into comprehension makes Turovskaya’s language straightforward.

Read on at Music & Literature.