Notes of the Phantom Woman

Author: Iana Boukova

Translators: John O'Kane and Ekaterina Petrova

Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse (2024)

With a near-compulsive insistence, Notes of the Phantom Woman addresses the question of what reality is and how we construct it. Ranging in subject from the presence of pigeons in the city, the dead ends of logic, how geological time becomes personal, and the boundary between statistics and Hell, the poems are connected by a rigorous inquiry into the illusions of thinking, the blind spots of utopianism, and the trouble with moral positioning. Results of such a task are—predictably—unpredictable; a healthy dose of black humor helps the poetry go down.