The Feeling Sonnets

Slyly funny, inventive, and virtuosic, this new collection from a Russian-American master challenges poetic convention and explores themes of alienhood, translation, and human emotion.

In Eugene Ostashevsky’s The Feeling Sonnets—his fourth collection of poems— words, idioms, sentences, and poetic conventions are dislodged and defamiliarized in order to convey the experience of living in a land, and a language, apart. The book consists of four cycles of fourteen unrhymed, unmetered sonnets. T...