Cover image by Simen Johan
The speaker of the poems in this first collection comes from a country that, like the Soviet Union, no longer exists, a place he treats with a mixture of nostalgia, disdain, and bewilderment as he strives to achieve a sense of order in his current disordered environment, a post-apocalyptic landscape with striking similarities to ours. He takes the reader back to a disjunctive childhod, on visits to Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, and Buffalo, through the ravages of physical and spiritual illness, and into and out of wars and ill-fated romantic escapades, as he carefully pieces together a complex narrative of self. This is a book of location and dis-location, intent and inaction, struggle and failure, restraint and mania, love and anger, savagery and healing, grief and merriment, elegy and ode.
MY SOVIET UNION
WINNER OF THE JUNIPER PRIZE FOR POETRY
ISBN: 9781558495852
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“"Whistling through the graveyard of atrocities large and small, Michael Dumanis's Juniper Prize-winning first book My Soviet Union leaps deftly among its personae, dictions, and poetic styles, always testing the capacity of its linguistic inventiveness to contend with the facts of capital-H History. The poet's formal dexterity and imaginative scope are not only impressive, but dizzying, even delightful—or strangely delightful."
—BOSTON REVIEW
“The 40 poems in this strong, Juniper Prize–winning debut are obsessed with, and at the same time refuse to acknowledge, dislocation—from history, literature, love, place, yearning and speech itself—with a barrage of verbal explosives. Reimagining such figures as Pol Pot, Mayakovsky, García Márquez and Joseph Cornell, and traveling between places as far-flung as Long Island, Vietnam and West Des Moines, Dumanis… restlessly submerges the reader in his perceptions... Dumanis overwhelms with intelligence and emotion. He is certainly a poet to watch.”
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, Starred Review
"My Soviet Union is a remarkable album of dark vaudeville and assured verbal performances. Its speakers are a host of desperate comedians at the edge of history, making do and making jokes in the ruins of empire. The spirits of Joseph Cornell, Mayakovsky, and Buster Keaton seem to ventriloquize the earthly, troublesome body of one Michael Dumanis, a haunted citizen born in a country that no longer exists, standing before us in a confluence of phrases that are themselves a sort of nation: crazed, American, beautiful, a giddy torrent of comedy and sorrow."
—MARK DOTY
"Michael Dumanis's My Soviet Union is a book in which history meets compassion, in which bleak nostalgia meets a confused and beautiful present. Dumanis's poems of 'identity' are also poems of similitude—he is a poet comfortable in parable and allegory, a poet of great lyric gifts and expressive range, a poet who delights with linguistic experimentations and hybrids. My Soviet Union is truly a dazzling launch."
—DENISE DUHAMEL
"Michael Dumanis, like cummings, is a bold romantic inventor, an ironist who anticipates abstract states as naturally as a wayward child imagines recess, but his poems also relish the quotidian, and his unspoken sources are the often grim politics of adulthood. Though his poems wear many masks, his central presence is unwavering freshness. Dumanis is a poet we need badly, who brings to every line both a respect for dailiness and a near absolute imaginative fidelity. Read My Soviet Union ; then read it again."
—RODNEY JONES
"My Soviet Union is indeed a union: of uncommon music and a kind of changeling language, so that we're never sure if we're clutching a wrist or a wrench, gazing at gauze or at Lillian Gish. The effect of this pas de deux is sublime. For sublime poetry, Longinus asserted, leaves more food in the mind than the words convey on first encounter. Dumanis brings together a feast of various small countries of the imagination. He assembles them into a grand union. He dismantles them. He gives us passages to love and passages to love—yes, you'll want to read everything at least two ways. And, more often, more."
—D.A. POWELL