Oksana Vasyakina

Elina Alter

For fans of Maggie Nelson and Eileen Myles, the lyrical and deeply moving story of a young queer woman’s journey across Russia to inter her mother’s ashes and to understand her sexuality, femininity, and grief

From one of Russia’s most exciting new voices, Wound follows a young lesbian poet on a journey from Moscow to her hometown in Siberia, where she has promised to bury her mother’s ashes. Woven throughout this fascinating travel narrative are harrowing and at times sublime memories of her childhood and her sexual and artistic awakening. As she carefully documents her grief and interrogates her past, the narrator of Oksana Vasyakina’s autobiographical novel meditates on queerness, death, and love and finds new words for understanding her relationship with her mother, her country, her sexuality, and her identity as an artist.

A sensual, whip-smart account of the complicated dynamics of queer life in present-day Siberia and Moscow, Wound is also in conversation with feminist thinkers and artists, including Susan Sontag, Louise Bourgeois, and Monique Wittig, locating Vasyakina’s work in a rich and exciting international literary tradition.

A Novel

Wound

For fans of Maggie Nelson and Eileen Myles, the lyrical and deeply moving story of a young queer woman’s journey across Russia to inter her mother’s ashes and to understand her sexuality, femininity, and grief From one of Russia’s most exciting new voices, Wound follows a young lesbian poet on a journey from Moscow to her hometown in Siberia, where she has promised to bury her mother’s ashes. Woven throughout this fascinating travel narrative are harrowing and at times sublime memories of her childhood and her sexual and artistic awakening. As she carefully documents her grief and interrogates her past, the narrator of Oksana Vasyakina’s autobiographical novel meditates on queerness, death, and love and finds new words for understanding her relationship with her mother, her country, her sexuality, and her identity as an artist. A sensual, whip-smart account of the complicated dynamics of queer life in present-day Siberia and Moscow, Wound is also in conversation with feminist thinkers and artists, including Susan Sontag, Louise Bourgeois, and Monique Wittig, locating Vasyakina’s work in a rich and exciting international literary tradition.

Lida Yusupova

Galina Rymbu

Daria Serenko

Lolita Agamalova

Elena Kostyleva

Egana Djabbarova

Elena Georgievskaya

Stanislava Mogileva

Ekaterina Simonova

Nastya Denisova

Yulia Podlubnova

F LETTER assembles the feminist poets who have palpably changed the Russian language over the last decade. Against the backdrop of state violence and oppression, this is electric dissent in pursuit of a democratic, egalitarian future. A lexicon for revolution worldwide. But this anthology's brilliance lies in its rhythm, energy, and depth of emotion--in its universal relevance rather than applied politics. As Eileen Myles writes of its verse in a foreword to the work, "there are lines like a curse that yodel radiantly out of the toothy mouth of the curser...lines that are just so fucking metonymic in their grace...I've been invited to witness. To smell the crowd and be charged by history."

New Russian Feminist Poetry

F Letter

Oksana Vasyakina

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