Gogol in Rome

Shortlisted for The Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. Katia Kapovich's poems embody a personal kind of lyricism. Often focused on specifics of locality and displacement, alienation and marginality, they remodel the actual and infuse poetic thought with a dual sense of time, where the past and the present live simultaneously. Here is a gallery of narrative portraits that are both unheroic and unforgettable - deaf and mute children, laundering women, Moldovan homosexuals, beggars, pickpockets, mental patients, black-marketeers, peasants, troubled teens, unknown artists, Israeli Bedouins, Russian draftees, Soviet boy scouts, political convicts ... Kapovich's characters are at home in Dostoyevskian, borderline worlds. Combining the polyphony of their voices into the registers of her own, different voice, the poet documents the great beauty that can sometimes emerge out of marginalized existence.