My Soviet Union

The speaker of the simultaneously funny and devastating poems in this remarkable first collection comes from a country that, like the Soviet Union, no longer exists, a place he treats with a mixture of nostalgia, disdain, and bewilderment as he strives to achieve a sense of order in his current disordered environment, a post-apocalyptic landscape with striking similarities to our own. He takes the reader through haunting and disjunctive childhood memories, on visits to Azerbaijan and West Des Moines, through the ravages of physical and spiritual illness, into and out of wars and ill-fated romantic escapades, as he carefully pieces together a complex narrative of self.This is a book of location and dis-location, intent and inaction, struggle and failure, restraint and mania, love and anger, savagery and healing, grief and merriment, elegy and ode. Technically, the poems-often litanies-are marked by syntactical variation, recurring imagery, paradoxical statement, cultural idioms, shifts between high and low diction, a carnivalesque sense of humor, and an elliptical approach to exposition. The speaker also takes on the identities of various personae in the book, including Joseph Cornell, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Pol Pot, a vaudevillian, a movie extra, minor dictators, vagrants, ambigendered lovers, and a lighthouse keeper on an uninhabited island.

Author: Michael Dumanis
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Published: 03/28/2007
Pages: 96
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.33lbs
Size: 8.92h x 6.08w x 0.28d
ISBN: 9781558495852


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 05/21/2007 pg. 36

About the Author
Michael Dumanis was born in the former Soviet Union and lived there until his parents were granted political asylum in the United States. He holds a BA from Johns Hopkins, an MFA from the University of Iowa, and a PhD from the University of Houston. Currently an assistant professor of English at Nebraska Wesleyan University, he is coeditor of the anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century.


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