As It Turned Out

Author: Dmitry Golynko 

Translators: Eugene Ostashevsky, Rebecca Bella, and Simona Schneider

Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse (2008)

Dmitry Golynko’s first English-language release, As It Turned Out, features both earlier and more current poetry, drawing on the author’s three books as well as internet and unpublished materials. The translators collaborated with the editor and the author to achieve the closest possible correspondence to the original Russian texts, all of which appear on facing pages.

"Hold it! How have we arrived at such a moment that could produce Dmitry Golynko’s poetry? How has Soviet history remade itself, faster than dial-up, in the years that lead up to these wide open poems that document the very public culture it runs with?"

–Robert Fitterman

"Sometimes life can feel a little too lived. Witness here the “shampooski,” the “the halfwit toastmaster,” the “déjà vengeance.” Golynko not only takes on, but takes in, this problem, as he responds to a variety of Russias—whether the lush monumentality or the ornate quotidian, his vocabularies mirror while evolving, resemble while describing."

–Rod Smith

"Particularly attuned to how language encodes power relations, Golynko creates a portrait of contemporary Russian life that is as darkly unsentimental as it is surgically precise."