Special Thanks
The Cafe Review would like to acknowledge and THANK
Anna Halberstadt for the wonderful job she did as our
Guest Editor for our Summer Issue! Kudos !,
In assembling a group of contemporary Russian Poets and Visual Artists
She has allowed us at The Cafe Review an opportunity to present to our readers
certainly one of the most comprehensive collections on this subject to come out
( in translation) this year. We are both PROUD and GRATEFUL
Steve Luttrell, editor in chief
The Cafe Review
Café Review 2019 Summer Russian Issue
Our latest Summer 2019 Issue of The Café Review continues our mission to bring Maine poetry to the world and poetry from around the world to Maine featuring poetry by Russian poets Gennady Aigi, Polina Barskova, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Vladimir Druk, Elena Fanailova, Maria Galina, Vladimir Gandelsman, Sergei Gandlevsky, Anna Glazova, Anna Halberstadt, Irina Mashinski, Yury Milorava, Philip Nikolayev, Helga Olshvang, Alexei Parshchikov, Dmitri Prigov, Lev Rubinstein, Andrei Sen-Senkov, Elena Shvarts, Victor Sosnora, Maria Stepanova, Marina Temkina, Alexei Tsvetkov and Dmitry Vedenyapin. This issue features work by artists Vitaly Komar and Oleg Vassilev with reviews by Wayne Atherton, Alyse Knorr and Julie Poitras Santos.
As always, we are an all volunteer micro-pub producing printed publications quarterly from Portland, Maine. If you love our issues and work here online, support us by donating or subscribing. Without our subscribers, we would not exist!
Poetry Excerpts from this Issue
Kulikovo Field
Selected poems from Written Between 1975 and 1989
Late Soviet and Post-Soviet Literature
Horror Eroticus (Carnal Love Does Not Prefigure Bliss)
View of New York from the Night Sky
In the vegetal life of a poet
Farewell to youth, my very own Falstaff
My age still years away from patriarchal
Elegy for the Local Poet
Sad Foresight
Father’s Day
I do not know how it happened
When I become an American
A view. Of this orderly desert
Risk
The top
Don’t return: the KGB is back
A Woman’s Jataka
(Shades in Paradise)
Assizi
At an Icy Lake in Madison
A Cheer
Pigeon Post
living in a serendipity
dear darkness
the mirror
We Come from A Country
Narcissus Married Echo
Cats
Lions
Minus Ship
Touch these limits
Take grey
no cue in chalk
That Play
Butterfly
Old Photographs
Every city has its own smell.
There is no station here, the old man said.
hedgehogs and toads
humus births the sour air of respiration
lightening never leaves
in a bee’s mind exists
The end of the world
In the Right-of-Way
An Attempt to Explain
Resh
Lamed
Vitebsk, 1914
and when among the slightly broken turns
Depiction of Achilles at Patroclus’s Bonfire
Spent by the sun
Oh! In these elegies there are many strange beetles
You don’t believe?
On joy — a bridge falling asleep
Sorrow and Joy
And what remains from love
The last songs are gathering
The Women’s Locker Room at “Planet Fitness”
Saturday and Sunday burn like stars
Thank You in Several Languages
Beach in Orbit
Loser
A Woman on the Right
Silence
Artist Biographies
Poet Biographies
Dmitry Vedenyapin
Alexei Tsvetkov
Marina Temkina
Maria Stepanova
Victor Sosnora
Elena Shvarts
Andrei Sen-Senkov
Lev Rubinstein
Dmitri Prigov
Alexei Parshchikov
Helga Olshvang
Philip Nikolayev
Yury Milorava
Irina Mashinski
Anna Halberstadt
Anna Glazova
Sergei Gandlevsky
Vladimir Gandelsman
Maria Galina
Elena Fanailova
Vladimir Druk
Arkadii Dragomoshchenko
Polina Barskova
Gennady Aigi
Reviewer Biographies
Julie Poitras Santos
Julie Poitras Santos: her writing has appeared in The Café Review, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, The Chart, Living Maps Review, The New Guard,and Be Wilder: A Word Portland Anthology,among others. Her poetry was selected as the Poets & Writers Maureen Egan Writers Exchange Contest first runner-up in 2017. Also a visual artist, her artwork has been exhibited widely in the US and abroad. She is a professor in the MFA Program at Maine College of Art.
Alyse Knorr
Alyse Knorr: is an assistant professor of English at Regis University and co-editor of Switchback Books. Her most recent book of poems, Mega–City Redux,won the 2016 Green Mountains Review Poetry Prize, selected by Olena Kalytiak Davis. She is also the author of the poetry collections Copper Motherand Annotated Glass,the non-fiction bookSuper Mario Bros. 3,and three poetry chapbooks. Her work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Denver Quarterly, Columbia Poetry Review, The Greensboro Review,and The Cincinnati Review,among others.
Wayne Atherton
Wayne Atherton: is senior editor of The Café Review.