In Progress

Russian Poetic Thinking

Features translations and essays, co-authored with Ilya Kutik.  This book includes translation of about two dozen poems by Russian poets ranging from Boris Pasternak and Marina Tsvetaeva to Ilya Kutik and his contemporaries among the poets of the "Metarealist" poets of contemporary Russia.  It also includes commentaries on poems and translations, and essays about the practices of a particular genealogy of Russian poetry that makes use of a fast movement in a poem, a movement that arises from the use of "centripetal" poetic devices that take the poem in unpredictable directions (those devices include wordplay, word transformation, rhyme, the use of the negative, and others).

How Poems Think 

The chapters of this book, a number of them published in American Poetry Review since 2006, explore how poems move from one idea or feeling or stage to the next--by what means, by what kind of progress, to what kinds of ideas, with what effect, and to what end.  Poets and writers discussed include Sophocles, Catullus, Shakespeare, John Donne, John Keats, Charles Baudelaire, Emily Dickinson, Ezra Pound, Daniil Kharms, Donald Davie, William Maxwell, William Goyen, Thomas McGrath, Gabriela Mistral, Muriel Rukeyser, Zbigniew Herbert, Odysseus Elytis, César Vallejo, Luis Cernuda, Hélène Cixous, Andrei Voznesensky, Joseph Brodsky, Arun Kolatkar, Mahmoud Darwish, Ilya Kutik, and others.