The Executed Sun
Shabalin s book cover
The Executed Sun
by Sergei Shabalin

A new book of poems by Sergei Shabalin, the New York poet, journalist, and essayist. His texts present a remarkable combination of surface simplicity and clarity (at the level of syntax and vocabulary, veering now toward the colloquial, now toward the archetypal) with a stratification of meanings, a doubling of perspectives, a rapid shift of optics before the reader has quite had time to grow accustomed. This produces an effect of estrangement: a vision of the world as an integral whole, inaccessible to the eye in its essence, blurred in the impressionist manner in its details, yet striking in its broader sweep.

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