The sonically-hypnotic poems in this collection pry open the space between sounds and what they mean, and the violence of this prying is analogous to the ordinary violences that women live with the world over. “Orange you happy yet, a serious threat/a surfeit, a certain fate, a surer fret,” Blitshteyn chants, and you find yourself wanting to feel her language on your tongue, even as that language evokes an unbearable reality. Wrapped up in these fiercely elegant poems are narratives of language acquisition, precarious immigrations, and song-like imperatives for the best kinds of destruction.
PRAISE FOR TWO HUNTERS
Two Hunters holds language in the tautology of fear as what we live and what we dream. Marina Blitshteyn offers us story and abandon, pain and power–what is claimed and reclaimed, learned and unlearned. Stark, sonic, these poems demand to be read in red.
–Khadijah Queen
Long awaited, but thankfully arriving at the moment we need it most, Marina Blitshteyn’s Two Hunters skillfully mirrors, confirms and explains our disorienting moment in history by mining the poets’ own experience of patriarchy and America with such confidence and linguistic dexterity we almost believe we can survive it. Sonically inventive, formally surprising, energetic, and sometimes a bit surreal, these poems are at once exhilarating to read and deeply unsettling (though necessary) in their truth.
– Lynn Melnick
Marina Blitshteyn, queen of the chapbook form, releases her first full-length collection, Two Hunters, later this month. Two Hunters offers you a Hurtz Donut on the playground. (The fun game where you get bopped in the nose and asked: “Hurts, don’t it?”) But Blitshteyn’s work isn’t cruel; it hurts because the depth of its empathy plumbs, plumbs, plunges.
–Krystal Languell, Poetry Foundation
Born in the Soviet Union, Marina Blitshteyn and her family fled to the US in 1991 as refugees. She studied English at SUNY Buffalo, where she edited the longstanding annual Name poetry journal, and Creative Writing at Columbia University, where she also served as a University Writing Fellow and consultant. She is the author of Two Hunters, her first full-length collection, to be published by Argos Books in 2018 with a CLMP Face-Out grant. Prior chapbooks include Russian for Lovers (Argos Books), $kill$ (dancing girl press), Nothing Personal (Bone Bouquet Books), and the forthcoming Sheet Music (Sunnyoutside Press). Her work has been anthologized in the new Brooklyn Poets Anthology, The &Now Awards 3: The Best Innovative Writing, Why I Am Not a Painter, and My Next Heart: New Buffalo Poetry. She teaches Composition and Rhetoric and experimental nonfiction, and occasionally runs The Loose Literary Canons, a feminist reading group in NYC.
