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Maxim Amelin The Joyous Science: Selected Poems of Maxim Amelin Trans. Derek Mong & Anne O. Fisher. Buffalo, New York. White Pine Press. 2018. 180 pages.
There is visceral excitement upon welcoming a new poet into one's personal canon- it's like collecting a little bit of immortal light-and Russian poet Maxim Amelin certainly deserves this. Born in 1990 at the very end of the Soviet Union, he has been active on the contemporary Russian poetry scene, as editor, critic, and translator; his three volumes exclusively of poetry, Cold Odes (1996), Dubia (1999), and The Gorgon's Steed (2003), cluster in a seven-year period from which derives the present bilingual selected volume (see WLT, Sept. 2017, 32-33).
The whimsical, eponymous title poem, "The Joyous Science" (a nod to Nietzsche's early volume of the same...