On the other side of the text

"Sentences" by Lida Yusupova: a book for the weekend from Ekaterina Pisareva

From the editorial office

Once a week on Fridays, Ekaterina Pisareva, the chief editor of the MyBook book service, including 260 thousand publications and 50 thousand audiobooks, will know with knowledge not only about the most interesting new products in 2020, but also choose those that can be read quickly and with pleasure.

Most often, when the word “poetry” is pronounced, ignorant people imagine lyrics, syllabo-tonic versification, familiar to us by school lessons of literature, or something like. But this is not the collection of “sentences” by the poetess Lida Yusupova, published in the publishing house “UFO”. This (as it means on the cover) “New Poetry” is completely different. And she, like our reality, is absurd, unbearable and merciless.

Yusupova invites the reader to become silent with a spy of crimes that will unfold before his eyes.

The red-haired girl is killed on an evening walk, the mother throws on the street of a newborn baby, a man is deprived of his life because of hatred of his sexual orientation, the child is wrapped in a patchwork blanket and attributed to the cemetery ... The worst thing is that everything is real here, and behind each phrase, human pain, despair, humiliation and death are hidden. All life is a text.

“Sentences” were built at the reception of Found Poetry - Yusupova takes words from the real sentences of Russian courts, posted in the Internet, and makes it not just a poetic text or political statement, but a conspiracy.

She seems to try to resurrect all the victims of violence, give them a voice and in their own way to immortalize them.

The terrible effect creates a emasculated bureaucratic language that stories are told - it does not convey any feelings and emotions, but this antideclarati, imaginary coldness of speech and detachment and there is violence.

It is as if you find yourself inside the text and become an accomplice, you observe what is happening, but you are not able to change anything.

Some verses included in the “Sentences” cycle were first printed in the Dead Dad (Kolonna Publications) collection in 2016. Four years later, the cycle has grown to a separate book and, it seems, can continue endlessly - what this collection has been made from, inexhaustible (you can recall the “testimonies” of Charles Reznicoff, who was preparing the judicial system in the post -war America of the last century, or the recent poem by Julia Googolev “there was such a thing” based on the materials of Moscow case).

The “sentences” of Yusupova is also a sentence to a society that does not hear the numerous voices of the victims, doom them to suffering with his unbelief, reproaches that they themselves are to blame for what happened. We see such stories in the news feed every day, scroll through the photos of the missing, read about the atrocities that occur in the big and cruel world around, and this does not touch us.

According to Human Rights Watch, every fourth family suffers from domestic violence, in fact, one of the most important texts of the collection - “a close face of a close face” - is devoted to the problem of decriminalization of domestic violence:

... Having caused <FULL NAME1> physical

pain

And bodily harm

in the form of soft tissue bruises

heads,

faces.

Crime and punishability of the act committed by him

were eliminated by the new criminal law

The criminal case is subject to termination

the magistrate

Decided:

Criminal case and persecution against

Shadrying <FULL NAME3>,

accused of committing a crime,

stop by the absence in the act of the composition

Crimes ...

In Yusupova’s documentary, individual words become a leitmotif, and the depersonal characters multiply, merging and alternating. The poetess deliberately mounts the text, deprives the heroes of the names, endowing them with initials or ordinal numbers - this “FULL NAME15”, that “FULL NAME6”. Not people are important, but their crimes - from the awareness of this, it becomes even more terrible. It is terrible to read these poems about violence, but even worse - to be on the other side of the text.