Irina Mashinski is the author The Naked World (MadHat Press, 2022) and of eleven books of poetry and essays in Russian. She is co-editor, with Robert Chandler and Boris Dralyuk, of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (Penguin Classics, 2015) and of Cardinal Points, the journal of Brown University’s Slavic Department, and co-translator of Lev Ozerov’s Portraits without Frames (NYRB, 2018). Her second English book, Giornata (Červená Barva Press), is forthcoming in the fall of 2022.
“The Naked World is a magical book, a story of four generations of one family, told through poems and cut through with accounts of Stalin’s Great Terror of the Thirties, wide-ranging meditations, and flashes of childhood memories from the Thaw of the Sixties and the post-Thaw Seventies. … We explore the ‘tessellating pattern’ of a life – of movement across borders, of the myths that carry us along, of grief transformed into resilience, of déjà vu. … I love the tenderness of details in this book, the whirlwind of details in time. But I also love its hard-earned knowledge that “to be alone takes skill.” -- Ilya Kaminsky, from the Preface
“Mashinski seeks liberating oblivion in a space that neither cares about nor notices her presence. The ‘A-merica’ of Mashinski’s experience, with the negating ‘A-,’ is ‘neither this, not that, nor the other, but a trying of the otherness,’ a laboratory of creative dissection and reassembly of the self. … Mashinski’s book is a virtuosic gift that amply rewards repeated reading — and listening.” -- The Los Angeles Review of Books