About Marina Blitshteyn
Marina Blitshteyn is a citizen of the United States. She was born in the USSR and came to the US in 1991, and is the author of two full-length collections, Two Hunters and i take your voice, winner of The Gatewood Prize. Chapbooks include Russian for Lovers, Nothing Personal, $kill$, Sheet Music, a chapbook of visual poetry Kaddish //, and a dual chapbook, landguage/mirror me.
Praise for form a more perfect
The poetry of Marina Blitshteyn is urgent. Inscribing itself within an inheritance of Jewish diasporic works, Slavic verse, and literatures of dreamed and dystopic new worlds, it grapples with multilingualism, identity, and the way language tries until it fails and falls apart, while paradoxically offering itself up as a rare salve. In the final poems, which are redacted, a line reads: “the poetry is for you.” In this sonically vibrant universe haunted by Moldova, where Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish, and English, as well as Buffalo, New York, and America are key players, Seussian rhymes are distorted, “ignorance is bills,” and the speaker is “still a stranger” stepping into Goodwill, where “one man’s / trash is another woman’s history.” Escaping one violence to meet another, the speaker, who has been mothered and othered, uprooted and put down, labeled and misconstrued, grapples with notions of home, family, and self in a world of sobered illusions whose only firm ground, in the end, is the materiality of sound and linguistic play. Despite its serious themes and pointed critiques, Blitshteyn’s voice is unshakably warm and inviting, uniting rather than divisive, shrewd and undeniable, moving seamlessly from the specifics of her distinctive world to universal considerations. This gives her verse a staying power and a rare complexity, such as that typically preoccupying literary scholars, for its unique set of circumstances. Beyond urgent, therefore, it reveals itself of great critical importance.—E.C. Belli, author of Objects of Hunger and A Sleep That Is Not Our Sleep
