Excerpts from Genya Turovskaya’s poetry manuscript, The World Is Not The World, a finalist for the 2015 TS Book Prize.
FAILURE TO DECLARE
I am beside myself
I have no beast in this ring, no horse in this race
Nobody ever always waves goodbye
The stars are different here
The wind is gusting in reverse
I left something out, something crucial, crossing through the customs gate
A figure, behind me, waving, reflected in the plexiglass partition
I could recognize the shape but not the face
I didn’t need to; I knew it
An empty window
A curtain flapping in the breeze
I pitched forward, tried to right myself, but kept falling without end
Keep falling to no end
There was nothing there to catch on, snag against
A tantalizing glitter, a blatant blank
The fortune in the fortune cookie says Learn Chinese
To have a fever
And When one can one must
Where do I live?
Where do I go when I go away?
The departures board was wiped clean
There was no message
But something happens to interrupt all well-laid plans
I was alert to the fog, a fugue of massing clouds, to a change in pressure, coalescing rivulets of rain
A physical vibration, the faintest tremor of the ground beneath my feet, the shifting of tectonic plates
The chafe, the plea in pleasure, for pleasure’s sake
Or was the fortune: When one must one can?
I recognized the empty window, the tantalizing glitter of my own reflection
The shape but not the face
I knew it, that there would be no message, no way to get a message back
I fell I fall I left I leave something out
The ground beneath my feet gives way
Where were we?
Here I am?
Where do I go?
Who is the witness to this story that I tell myself?
Is this rupture?
Rapture?
Attention? Inattention?
The bonds grown slack?
There is an errand I’ve been sent on
An errancy
I am not spared
I am inside the observation tower beside myself astride the horse I do not have a horse in this
Nobody ever always waves goodbye goodbye goodbye goodbye goodbye
The stars are different here, the stars do not make sense
I can connect these burning dots
There is a hummingbird
There a dancing bear
There a face with night pouring out of the black sockets of its eyes
What are these strange celestial figurations?
Is any crossing safe?
When does the dancing bear claw its way back to nature?
When does a hummingbird become a hurricane?
Which is the miracle and which the natural disaster?
What is at stake?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Genya Turovskaya is a poet, translator and psychotherapist. She was born in Kiev, Ukraine and grew up in New York City. She is the author of the chapbooks Calendar (UDP, 2002), The Tides (Octopus Books, 2007), New Year’s Day (Octopus Books, 2011) and Dear Jenny (Supermachine, 2011). Her poetry and translations of contemporary Russian poets have appeared in Chicago Review, Conjunctions, A Public Space, Aufgabe, Octopus, jubilat, Supermachine, Gulf Coast and other publications. Her translation of Aleksandr Skidan’s Red Shifting was published by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2008. She is the co-translator of Elena Fanailova’s Russian Version (UDP, 2010) which won the University of Rochester’s Three Percent 2010 award for Best Translated Book of Poetry. She is also a co-translator of Endarkenment, The Selected Poems of Arkadii Dragomoshchenko (Wesleyan University Press 2014). She lives in Brooklyn, NY.
AUTHOR STATEMENT
I’m interested in a poetry that creates a shared state of being — of thought and feeling — within the reader, between poem and reader. I want the poem to shuttle through the permeable membrane between dream and waking life, to get lost, struggle, change course. I’m thrilled by the moment when the intense interiority and subjectivity of a poem collides with, changes, and is changed by, the world.
Selections from The World Is Not The World be found here: