top of page
SMOKES

SMOKES

$18.00Price

ISBN: 978-0-9991994-6-6

Pub Date: Apr. 2019

Pages: 120


By Yuri Izdryk

Roman Ivashkiv and Erín Moure, translators


Yuri Izdryk’s Smokes explodes with existential contemplations and addresses regarding love, identity, nature, society, and the divine. The poems teem with energy; Izdryk’s indefatigable play with language encompasses incessant punning rhymes, Joycean multilingual puns, ludic shifts of tone and register, and scintillating intertextual games. In creating a sophisticated semantic soundscape where sound and rhythm defiantly drive meaning, Izdryk impishly reinvigorates Ukrainian poetry, which only recently had begun to lean towards free verse, by re-invoking its strong rhyming tradition. In these poems, linguistic dexterity is the roll of the dice that, though it can’t vanquish apocalyptic despair, can keep its desolation—at least briefly—at bay.

    A deep restlessness as well as an intense privacy underlie the poet’s wordplay, both manifested in a refusal to let language settle into any clear and straightforward sense. Izdryk seems to be constantly seeking something or someone and constantly avoiding being found himself.

    –Benjamin Myers, World Literature Today


    Smokes contains both rhyming and free verse poems. Izdryk is probably one of the most notable poets in modern Ukrainian literature who constantly plays with the form of the text: he is good at both. Perhaps, this is the main poetic quality of the author, along with the real zen which you achieve from reading these poems behind the smokescreen.

    —Lilia Shutiak, Apofenie


    Born in Kalush, Ukraine in 1962, Yuri Izdryk is an iconoclastic writer, musician, and visual and performing artist. Outside Ukraine, he is best known for his 1997 novel, Wozzeck, translated into English by Marko Pavlyshyn and published by CIUS Press in 2006. Izdryk owes his immense popularity in Ukraine not only to his superb literary talent and the aura of mystery he has created over the years, but also to Chetver (Thursday), the samizdat experimental literary journal “of texts and visions” he produced almost single-handedly for over twenty-five years and to the hip-hop/trap band DrumTyAtr in which he performs.



    Roman Ivashkiv is Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Alabama. He researches transmesis (i.e., fictional representation of translation and translators) in contemporary Ukrainian literature. 




    Erín Moure has published twenty-three books of poetry and non-fiction and twenty-two translations or co-translations of poetry in Canada, the USA, and the UK. A forty-year retrospective of her own work, Planetary Noise: Selected Poetry of Erín Moure, appeared in 2017 (Wesleyan University Press).


    bottom of page