Into the Snow - Selected Poems of Gennady Aygi

By Gennady Aygi, Translated by Sarah Valentine

• Description
• Reviews

• In packages—in the supermarket—piles of potatoes.
  And on the posters—in the supermarket—the Shaman.
  
  Animated by an elemental sense of life, mortality, and humanity, the Chuvash poet Gennady Aygi wrote poems that fused his experience of ethnic difference with an avant-garde aesthetic. Artfully translated from the Russian by poet and scholar Sarah Valentine, these strong, precise poems challenge language to plumb the depths of human feeling and simultaneously attune to linguistic experimentalism.

• Translator Sarah Valentine puts a fresh spin on the experimental master’s Russian and Chuvashian poems, capturing Aygi’s brilliantly diverse styles and forms in a compelling and genuine space. As sprawling as it is specific, Into the Snow serves as a powerful introduction into the work of the cold, desolate writer who learned to embrace his immediate landscape, political and natural, highlighted with a transcendental struggle, and a love for a poetics of minimalism.
  Greg Bem, Plop!
  
  Animated by an elemental sense of life, mortality, and humanity, the Chuvash poet Gennady Aygi wrote poems that fused his experience of ethnic difference with an avant-garde aesthetic. Artfully translated from the Russian by poet and scholar Sarah Valentine.
  NewPages
  
  Aygi’s work shows how even simplicity can be revolutionary when it reinforces the power of the human soul over political obstacles.
  Amy Henry, HTMLGIANT
  
  I enjoyed the breathless texture and brevity of these poems—as if they could barely bear themselves.
  Joyelle McSweeney, Montevidayo 

  Into the Snow is a lovely primer into the work of a poet who is beginning to gain worldwide notoriety.
  Erin Lyndal Martin, The Rumpus
  
  Aygi explains that his art seeks to express “an orientation toward the human in his or her connection with nature—with its unchanging miraculousness." Somehow, by turning away from rational thought and the trappings of modernity, we can tap into something meaningful, and if we are lucky, we will perhaps even achieve a kind of enlightenment.
  Jamie Olson, Berfois