Genya Turovskaya was born in Kiev, Ukraine, and grew up in New York City. She is the author of The Breathing Body of This Thought (Black Square Editions, 2019) and of the chapbooks Calendar (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2002), The Tides (Octopus Books, 2007), New Year’s Day (Octopus Books, 2011), and Dear Jenny (Supermachine, 2011). Her poetry and translations of contemporary Russian poets have appeared in Chicago Review, Conjunctions, A Public Space, and other publications. Her translation of Aleksandr Skidan’s Red Shifting was published by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2008. She is the co-translator of Elena Fanailova’s Russian Version (UDP, 2009, 2019) which won the University of Rochester’s Three Percent award for Best Translated Book of Poetry in 2010. She is also a co-translator of Endarkenment: The Selected Poems of Arkadii Dragomoshchenko (Wesleyan University Press, 2014). She lives in Brooklyn.
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The Breathing Body of This ThoughtFrom"Anchorage"
but we are still at sea we climbed into the rocking
boat again the things that we could not afford
to remember in the vernacular
sun
sinking backwards into the world’s
light industry Eros in idle hands
The Breathing Body of This Thought: -
The Breathing Body of This ThoughtFrom"Life on Mars (Another New Years Day)"
The moon glowed blue through the tears in the clouds
The moon glows blue like Orphesus’ severed head
The tundra swans bark like dogs in the night
Or dogs bark like tundra swans
I have lost again the fluidity of tears
I am once more the child filled with unformulated words
A loony-tune torn apart by the trees
The Breathing Body of This Thought: -
The Breathing Body of This ThoughtFrom"Listening Machine"
I wrestled with an abstract geometry—what
is an angel?—for a name
to stitch to the breast of my fatigues, to stick to my forehead’s
opaque tar, wrestled for the press of its celestial digits into
the indistinct, featureless moon
of my skull.
If there is no one to name you,
name yourself, says the Listening Machine.
The Breathing Body of This Thought:
“In this provocative debut, translator Genya Turovskaya explores questions of truth, knowledge, and epistemology . . . As Turovskaya moves between fragmented texts and seemingly self-contained ones, knowledge is made and unmade, reminding the reader of its inherent instability. Indeed, Turovskaya’s strength lies in her ability to create a narrative arc through form as well as content, her innovative style revealing new approaches to the philosophical tradition.” —Publishers Weekly [on The Breathing Body of This Thought]
“Imagine you could lift time up like a lid; imagine beneath a substratum of first and last particulars that form brief visionary episodes, in which life's beauties and terrors glint and mutate on ‘the floating filament of temporary/vowels.’ In Genya Turovskaya's The Breathing Body of This Thought, the protean force of language is newly manifest, in poems of sustained acuity and extraordinary power.” —Ann Lauterbach
“With equal parts silence and strength, Genya Turovskaya's astute language accrues force and gorgeously takes its time. This book is not afraid to build slowly and to burn. The thoughts are electric as they leap from phrase to phrase and they possess a compelling interiority throughout. There is a heady mix of music and address all built from a singular imagination. Or, as she writes: "all of this is real." The Breathing Body of This Thought is a wonderful book.” —Peter Gizzi
Genya Turovskaya’s spare and haunting poems reside in a vernacular of absence and disintegration that can be felt and witnessed with each exquisitely wrought line. These poems refuse the business and noise of contemporary life in order to clear a space for what’s most deeply interior, private, and elusive about the world of the mind. It’s almost shocking to encounter poetry like this, where every emotion is understated, but never muted. Turovskaya maintains affinities for earlier twentieth-century poetic traditions, yet is firmly rooted in a vibrant American avant garde. Every page here is animated by a spirit of inquiry that resists certainty on a quest into the numinous recesses of our most authentic experience.