What We Saw from This Mountain

Poetry. Translated from the Russian by Julia Trubikhina-Kunina, Betsy Hulick, and Gerald Janacek. This is the first English-language collection of poetry by contemporary Russian poet, essayist, and prose writer Vladimir Aristov, a satellite figure of the Metarealist (or Meta-metaphorist) literary movement of the 1980s-90s. While the late Alexei Parshchikov and Arkadii Dragomoshchenko are somewhat better known to US readers, Aristov, who was their close friend, exemplifies both poets’ trajectories–his work explores metaphor-centered narrative poetry while assimilating American Language poetry and European postmodern theory. Aristov’s poetics is characterized by a philosophical thoughtfulness made more profound by his lifelong work as a scientist, and by striking images that evoke the late poetry of Osip Mandelstam.