Katia Kapovich

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Biographical note:  Katia Kapovich hails from Soviet Moldova. Her membership in a samizdat dissident group precluded publication of her writing in the USSR. She worked on archeological digs, gauged petroleum tanks, smuggled sheepskins, then emigrated, settling in the US in 1992. The author of six Russian collections and one previous volume of English verse, Gogol in Rome (Salt, 2004), she lives in Boston and co-edits Fulcrum: an annual of poetry and aesthetics.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844714476
ISBN:  9781844714476
Author:  Katia Kapovich
Title:  Cossacks and Bandits
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BB
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Feb-08
Extent:  96pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  12 mm
Weight:  144 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 12.99
Price:  USD 23.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  The modern world is a crucible of risks and pressures. Katia Kapovich’s new poetry collection, Cossacks and Bandits, addresses a coherent range of cultural, aesthetic, psychological, philosophical, social and political issues relevant to the complexities of modern life. How does one survive war, terror, loss, injustice, trauma, displacement, marginalization and other hurtful experiences without embracing cynicism or indifference? What resources of strength must we rely on in a society that is ideologically and economically fluid and at times cynical and indifferent, where mass culture, institutional religion and national belonging have only weak and doubtful remedies to offer? The book focuses on the personal histories of men and women who are survivors of sociopolitical and economic distress. To Kapovich such individuals are the true modern hero and heroine. They show that at the limits of experience, survival and dignity depend on creative thinking, on a leap of imagination, as in the Russian children’s game of Cossacks and bandits. Set in the US, Eastern Europe and the Middle East—regions that the poet knows intimately, having spent a considerable part of her life in each—this volume is a poetic survival guide to cultural and geographical displacement, alienation and marginality. With feeling and mastery, with sadness and humor, Kapovich fuses a diverse polyphony of voices and themes into original, full-blooded, lyric American verse of great general and literary interest.

Table of contents:
Europe’s Gate
Tutor
Hero
They’ve killed the rat that lived alone
The Bells
A Burn
Ink Rain
The Girl That Saved a Village
Commercial Shoot
The Hardest Money I Made
Satori
Dum Spiro Scribo
The Airport is Another Country
The Race We Lost
The Happiest Money I Made
To Catch a Hedgehog
Foreword
In Absentia
The Birth of Comedy out of the Spirit of Gossip
A Movie Star over Drinks Upstairs at the Pudding
The Ferry
Call-Up
In Nabokov’s Memory
Good Luck
A Portrait of a Dog as an Older Guy
Everyone Is Saved
Guest and Ghost
Drawing Lesson
Hermitage
December 10
Hide and Seek
Saturday at Schoenhof’s Foreign Books
Flamenco Evening
Locked Out
Fifteen Minutes and Eight Years
Laundromat
A Treatise on Boredom
Pot Luck
Mike the Meshugganah
Leaving Woodshole
Writing Home
Museum
Sergeant D
Mirage
People versus Trees
Sticking to the Truth
Ward Number Six
Liteinii Avenue, St. Petersburg
The Kiss
Lifer
The Brawl
Vertigo
Happy Fainting
The Stolen Skyscraper
The Big Dig
The Unswimmable
Counting
Strong Arms
“Mother, I can still touch those winters…”
Promenade
To Whom It May Concern
The Dive
A Fight on My Hands
Matches
That One
Confession of an Urbanist
A Strange Language
Bottom Line
Who Else?
Secrets
Music
A Kind of Normal Life
The Best Line
Postcard from Moscow
The Seventh String
Cossacks and Bandits
The Wall
Garbage Day

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Excerpt from book:  

A Portrait of a Dog as an Older Guy

When his owner died in 2000 and a new family
moved into their Moscow apartment,
he went to live with mongrels in the park.
In summer there was plenty of food, kids
often left behind sandwiches, hotdogs and other stuff.
He didn’t have a big appetite,
still missing his old guy.
He too was old, the ladies no longer excited him,
and he didn’t burn calories chasing them around.
Then winter came and the little folk abandoned the park.
The idea of eating from the trash occurred to him
but the minute he started rummaging in the
overturned garbage container, a voice
in his head said: “No, Rex!”
The remnants of a good upbringing lower
our natural survivor skills.

I met him again in the early spring of 2001.
He looked terrific. Turning gray became him.
His dark shepherd eyes were perfectly bright,
like those of a puppy.
I asked him how he sustained himself
in this new free-market situation
when even the human species suffered from malnutrition.
In response he told me his story:
how at first he thought that life without his man
wasn’t worth it, how those
who petted him when he was a pet
then turned away from him, and how one night
he had a revelation.

His man came to him in his sleep,
tapped him on his skinny neck and said:
“Let’s go shopping!” So the next morning he took the subway
and went to the street market
where they used to go together every Sunday and where
vendors recognized him and fed him
to his heart’s content.
“Perhaps you should move closer to that area ?”
I ventured.—“No, I’ll stay here,” he sighed,
“oldies shouldn’t change their topography. That’s
what my man said.”
Indeed, he sounded like one himself.

Unpublished endorsement :  Poems that chatter and sing at the same time. Melodic stories. Lyrical gossip. Writing which makes itself heard.

Simon Armitage

Unpublished endorsement :  Katia Kapovich’s new book of poems retains all her familiar virtues – her marvelous sense of story, her fearless but elegant use of form, her wit and delight in the world – but shows evidence of a new confidence in her adopted language. She moves with new lyric ease between Cambridge and Russia, between sensuous apprehensions of American life and memories of friends and family left behind. Some of the poems, especially those written in a tone of wry lament, and from a position of difficult exile, are absolutely heartbreaking.

James Wood

Unpublished endorsement :  Katia Kapovich’s work combines the delight and wisdom of Russian form with the wild soliloquy of American freedom, and the consequence is wonderful.

Glyn Maxwell

Previous review quote:  Katia Kapovich possesses one of the freshest, most arresting poetic voices I have heard in a long time. She can sway effortlessly from the most common detail into zones of sheer imaginative wonder. That she offers a rare view of a poet’s daily life in Soviet Russia only adds to the broader significance of her writing. Gogol in Rome is a powerful gathering of her best work in English.

Billy Collins

Previous review quote:  Katia Kapovich’s indelible vignettes introduce us to the eerily desolate landscapes of the post-Glasnost Soviet Union, often through the filter of that dream-like, transitional consciousness peculiar to the recent émigré to America. Her poetry is singularly vivid, poignant, and manages to capture in miniature what Babel and Chekov achieve in their finest tales.

August Kleinzahler