Day of the Border Guards: Poems

"In Day of the Border Guards, Katherine Young examines what it means to be a poet of witness. And what she's a witness to happens to be nothing less than the Soviet Union before the fall. Hers is a journey haunted by the ghosts of Pushkin and Bulgakov ("I could be myself, or any one / of Pushkin's women, or Margarita walking / the alleys with yellow flowers in her arms"), the ghosts of dissident poets like Osip Mandelstam, and the personal ghosts of romantic disappointment and philosophical doubt (is she a witness who sees but feels nothing? or is she unable to see at all?). Young's odyssey is staggering in its scope and vision, but poetry lives in the details and here there are innumerable places where the poetry simply takes your breath away. In "Nearing Chernobyl," for example, Young writes: "For there's enchantment aplenty here: / the cold wheeling of comets, breath / of the sun howling down on the rump / of a woman peeing by a tree in Ukraine. / I carry the dust of the universe on my shoes." Lines any poet--even Pushkin or Lermontov or Mandelstam--would be proud of." --John Surowiecki, author of Flies

Katherine E. Young is an award-winning translator of Russian poetry, as well as the author of two chapbooks of original poetry.