The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by regular reviewer Vincent Francone on Oksana Zabuzhko’s Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex, which is translated from the Ukrainian by Halyna Hryn and available from Amazon Crossings.
Here’s the opening of Vince’s not-entirely-positive review:
Reading Oksana Zabuzhko’s Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex is like having bad sex. You’re not enjoying yourself but you don’t necessarily feel like stopping. Your mind wanders, you wonder how long until it’s over, and you may even fake a response just so it’ll stop. After all, it’s late and you need to get some sleep.
If this seems an unfair analogy, I apologize, but so much of the book is about sex, both in terms of sexuality and gender, that it seems apt to think of the book in this way. If I may (pun alert) extend my analogy: the book, like bad sex, is hard to forget because of the tease and lack of climax. It presents stimulating ideas but fails to focus on them with any sustained energy, leaving the reader frustrated.
Clearly I am in the minority; the book was a bestseller in the Ukraine and the author’s reputation was cemented by its publication. It seems an important book, worthy of translation and publication here in these United States, though one might argue that the subject matter (feminine sexuality and gender norms) dictates the book’s importance more than the actual book. Perhaps too many other writers have mined this territory before, thus the “controversy” mentioned on the book’s back cover is relative. In the Ukraine, a frank exploration of feminine sexuality might be bold, but nothing in the book seemed shocking to these jaded eyes.
Click here to read the whole piece.
The latest addition to our Reviews Section is a piece by Vincent Francone on Jacques Dupin’s Of Flies and Monkeys, which is translated from the French by John Taylor and available from Bitter Oleander Press. (Probably easiest to order this directly from SPD.)
“Vincent Francone” is one of our regular contributors. (In fact, he has a “25 Days of the BTBA” piece coming out on Friday.) Additionally, he’s a writer and a reader for TriQuarterly Online.
Here’s the opening of his piece:
My head hasn’t been in poetry lately. Call it burn out—last year I read mostly poems—or attribute it to grad school killing my love for poetry, but I have been reading more prose as of late. Subsequently, my recent poetry reading has mostly been out of obligation.
That being said, it takes a lot to get me excited about poetry. Jacques Dupin’s work is, thankfully, the kind of poetry that does intrigue, delight, and reward, making it the ideal poetry to reignite my old love. The recent release of three of his works, collected under the title Of Flies and Monkeys, makes the case for Dupin’s importance in the world of contemporary poetry. Dupin is an interesting figure. A contemporary of Yves Bonnefoy and follower of Francis Ponge, his name is not bandied about with the regularity of his peers. Add to that, his poems ride the crest between the legacy of surrealism and the state sanctioned aesthetic of political rumination. Neither of these trends suited Dupin, whose work is at once immediate and startling (“a clearing sodomoy / her saintly hem fucked / under the same low leaves”) even when the images veer into the obscure (“As if I were the moist imprint of her voice. The oil and the gathering of her endless worm-screws in the air”). Dupin’s images are both strong and subtle, suggesting a modern-day Artuad who pulls back just before his poems become clouded by the grotesque. This is a writer who understands his craft, and while he refuses to adhere to trends his work has the balance and grace of a trained master.
Click here to read the entire review.
