Air Raid

The Siege of Leningrad began in 1941 and lasted 872 days, resulting in the most destructive blockade in history. Already shaken by Stalin’s purges of the ’30s, Leningrad withstood the siege at a great human cost. Air Raid takes us through the archives of memory and literature in this city of death. Polina Barskova’s polyphonic poems stretch the boundaries of poetic form—this is what we’re left with after poetry’s failure to save nations and people: post-death, post-Holocaust, post-Siege, post-revolution; post-marriage and post-literature. How does language react to such a catastrophe? How does a poet find language for what cannot be told? This new translation of a leading contemporary Russian poet confronts English excavating its muteness, stutter, and curse.

Polina Barskova is a poet and a scholar, author of twelve collections of poems and two books of prose in Russian. Her collection of creative nonfiction, “Living Pictures,” received the Andrey Bely Prize in 2015 and is forthcoming in German with Suhrkamp Verlag and in English with NYRB. She edited the Leningrad Siege poetry anthology Written in the Dark (UDP) and has three collections of poetry published in English translation: This Lamentable City (Tupelo Press), The Zoo in Winter (Melville House) and Relocations (Zephyr Press). She has taught at Hampshire College, Amherst College, and Smith College. In 2021, she will be teaching Russian Literature at the University of California at Berkeley.

"This elegiac and terrifying book, so filled with voices' various rhythms, will stay in my memory as a moment of stillness..."
- Ilya Kaminsky

"Through a dazzling variety of poetic forms and with genuine poetic courage, Polina Barskova—one of the best poets writing in Russian today—reenacts the Siege of Leningrad, tragic pages of Russian history, and the lives of her favorite poets, as well as her own life with its joys, pains, and dramas. Translated into English by Valzhyna Mort, a superb poet herself, Air Raid reaffirms the significance of poetry as the historical medium uniquely equipped to articulate painful historical experiences and intimately connect them with today's sensibilities."
- Mark Lipovetsky, Columbia University

"Air Raid is a study of human response to history; a light-catching collection that casts the minute and individual alongside the collective experience of survival and loss. It is a gift to have this polyphonic work of cultural legacy presented to English-speakers in such excellent translation."
- Marina Brown, Los Angeles Review