The Feeling Sonnets

The Feeling Sonnets are written in an English that is translingual not only because it engages other languages but also because it reflects upon itself in uncertainty as if it were the work of a language learner. Words, idioms, sentences, poetic conventions are made strange, dislocated, recontextualised to convey some of the linguistic effects of the migration experience, the experience of non-nativeness. The book includes four cycles of fourteen unrhymed, unmetered, logically Petrarchan sonnets. The first cycle asks about the relationship between interpretation and emotion: whether ‘we feel the feelings that we call ours’. The second, mainly composed of ‘daughter sonnets’, describes bringing up children in a foreign language. The third, ‘Die Schreibblockade’, German for writer’s block, talks about foreign-language processing of inherited historical trauma. The fourth cycle is about translation. A libretto commissioned by Italian composer Lucia Ronchetti follows, about Ravel’s interaction with Paul Wittgenstein over the Piano Concerto for the Left Hand. Gwyneth Lewis writes, 'Eugene Ostashevsky is a multilingual language explorer. His The Feeling Sonnets are an exhilarating and witty enquiry into the designs that language has on us as intellectual, domestic and historical beings. This is poetry as punning philosophy, both entertaining and deeply serious. This book is a tour de force, turning languages' spotlights onto speech itself. Yet again, Carcanet is publishing important poetry.' Born in Leningrad, Ostashevsky grew up in Brooklyn. He is now based in Berlin and New York. In his last full book of poetry, The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi, published by NYRB Poets, discusses migration, translation, and second-language writing as practiced by pirates and parrots. His previous book, The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza, published by Ugly Duckling Presse in Brooklyn, examines the defects of natural and artificial languages.

About the Author :
Eugene Ostashevsky was born in Leningrad, grew up in Brooklyn and is now based in Berlin and New York. His books of poetry include The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi, which discusses the challenges of communication between pirates and parrots, and The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza, which examines the defects of natural and artificial languages. As translator of avant-garde and experimental literature in Russian, he focuses on the OBERIU group (Daniil Kharms, Alexander Vvedensky) and its predecessors and successors. He has received the International Poetry Prize of the City of Muenster and the National Translation Award from the American Literary Translators Association.

Review :
'Feelings proliferate in The Feeling Sonnets, and first among them is the feeling that we have to ask what we mean by feeling. It is to feel his way toward an answer to that primary question that the brilliant poet Eugene Ostashevsky has written this collection of vivacious, witty, and anguished poems. As the poems unfold, language gets caught up in proliferative play. The poet flounders through fields of feeling, one felt word spilling out of another, one spelt word spelling another. Feeling moves from one cultural or linguistic context to another, doubling and redoubling the potential for meaning and the potency of meaning's prolific uncertainty and occasional absurdity. And extending through the linguistic microsystem of vowels and consonants that shift meanings from place and place (and even nation to nation) is the exquisite sensibility of a poet, erudite, humble, and closely watching over those he loves. This is an extraordinary and beautiful book.' Lyn Hejinian 'Eugene Ostashevsky is a multilingual language explorer. The Feeling Sonnets is an exhilarating and witty enquiry into the designs that language has on us as intellectual, domestic and historical beings. This is poetry as punning philosophy, both entertaining and deeply serious. This book is a tour de force, turning languages' spotlights onto speech itself. Yet again, Carcanet is publishing important poetry.' Gwyneth Lewis 'Ostashevsky's immense and multilingual opus of philosophy, language, pun and the absurd is a performative and rollicking ride.' Jacqueline Saphra, The Poetry Review 'The poems are brilliant and clever, but not arrogant. There is a humility to working with what you're given... This book builds and builds, moving beyond the line to spread like a root system, though admittedly without a root system's sense of calm. The book turns language over and over with the energy of a washing machine on a spin cycle so fast you are worried it's about to launch itself into orbit (I mean that in a good way, it's exhilarating stuff).' Stefan Tobler, And Other Stories