Marina Tsvetaeva is acknowledged today as one of the twentieth century’s greatest poets, a masterful innovator who produced a remarkable body of work before her untimely death in 1941. This bilingual collection contains six of her acclaimed narrative poems, most translated into English for the first time.
Tsvetaeva always regarded the narrative poem as her true challenge, and she created powerful and intensely original works in this genre. They can be seen as markers of various stages in her poetic development, ranging from the early, folk-accented On a Red Steed to the lyrical-confessional Poem of the Mountain and Poem of the End to the more metaphysical later poems, An Attempt at a Room, Poem of the Mountain, a beautiful requiem for Rainer Maria Rilke, New Year’s Greetings, and Poem of the Air, a stirring celebration of Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight and the quest for the soul’s freedom. These translations were first published by Ardis in 1998 and reprinted by Overlook in 2004 and 2009. The current edition was published by Shearsman Press (UK) in 2021.
Six Trains of No Return collects twelve short stories and novellas that examine immigrant sagas and dislocations.
When Clea returns to London with her new Russian husband, she is surprised to see him become even more eccentric.
After a century of brooding and talking telepathically to his Mausoleum janitor from his glass coffin, Vladimir Lenin awakens—alive and bewildered in the modern world.
A haunting dystopia some readers have called “the new 1984.” In a society where memory is rewritten and resistance is pre-approved, freedom isn’t restricted; it’s redefined. As systems evolve beyond human control and choice becomes a simulation, true defiance means refusing the script, even when the system already knows you will.
Original poetry by Nina Kossman, accompanied by a selection of poems by Marina Tsvetaeva, translated from Russian by Kossman. “The sea is a postcard,” writes Nina Kossman. There is both something elemental in this vision and—iron-tough.” —Ilya Kaminsky
“13 short pieces…pungently convey the effects of growing up under a totalitarian regime.” —Publishers Weekly