The Bookslut on Dmitry Golynko's As It Turned Out (translated by Eugene Ostashevsky and Rebecca Bella, with Simona Schneider for Ugly Duckling Press):
Poised within a matte black cover are poems that slice, as scalpels sharpened by years of linguistic oversimplification, at the postmodernist scab that formed after the Soviet Union’s dissolution in 1991. With “brutal naturalism” and the reassemblage of stumbled-upon things, Golynko’s incongruous fragments of an equally alien experience come into being as a clinical experiment of sorts: its function resultant upon the “debasement of the soul.” As such, Westerners seeking explanation in Golynko’s chapbook will not find it, for to a large extent the illusionary scenes of a society caught in “the speech of criminality” continue to resound in a pitch that remains as foreign as the original language of this translated collection. Try as we may, our “emery board won’t admit [us] into [Golynko’s] photograph.” And yet, this unflinching non-admittance proves as stimulating as it is cruel.
Whereas “Sashenka” may expound the “dandyism, camp and mauvais goût” of Golynko’s early postmodern writing, his conveyance of human behavior as mechanized manifests most significantly in “Elementary Things”:
it has an increate, morbid, inanimate nature
the elementary thing is always mimicking something
rarely itself, more often the papal nuncio, satrap
old father superior or stepmother maniac
usually monsters or cultural figures
it sometimes imitates an immobilized idol
cadaver tricked out in sackcloth
professor basking in auditoria
at times struts like a hussar, fans itself with a dolman
wears a cossack coat, on the rim of a reservoir
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