Cold Hub Press ~ Mikhail Aizenberg

freepost per copy – national & international

price NZ$19.50

Level with Us

Mikhail Aizenberg

with translations by J. Kates

ISBN: 978-0-473-17395-1

Softcover chapbook 28pp

A bi-lingual edition of 12 poems by Russian poet Mikhail Aizenberg.

Translations by US poet & literary translator J. Kates.  Of Say Thank You,

J. Kates’ 2007 Zephyr Press volume of Aizenberg poems, F.D. Reeve wrote:

“Fresh and marvellous....a philosophical innovator always pressing new

thoughts out of language,  each poem a repeated surprise.....These poems

and their skilled translations are our antennae through darkness.”

Once level with us, now under our feet

a honeycomb of chambers, like old, blocked mine-shafts.

Rubbish, made homely by petty creatures –

the crumbling earth piles up in strata.          

MIKHAIL AIZENBERG was born in Moscow in 1948,  & graduated from

the Moscow Architectural Institute in 1972. He has been writing poems

since the mid 1960s, & is a major figure in post-Soviet literature.

Translations of his work have appeared in numerous English-language

magazines, as well as in the anthologies Third Wave: The New Russian Poetry

(University of Michigan Press, 1992) & In the Grip of Strange Thoughts

(Zephyr Press, 1999). A bilingual chapbook of his poems, Less than a Meter,

was published by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2004, & a full-length bilingual selection, Say Thank You, was published by Zephyr Press in 2008. In 2002 Aizenberg was awarded a Brodsky Fellowship for residence in Rome, & in

2003 he won the Andrey Bely prize. He continues to live in Moscow.