American Samizdat

Author: Jehanne Dubrow

Publisher: Diode Editions (2019)

Imagine a United States in which the First Amendment no longer exists. What would we say? What kind of poems would we read and write? In her seventh collection of poetry, American Samizdat, Jehanne Dubrow contemplates this possibility. Composed as series of terrified fragments, the book replicates the urgency of the Cold War-era, dissident writings once known as “samizdat,” underground publications that were forbidden by the state.

"To say that Jehanne Dubrow's American Samizdat is a brilliant book would be to say the truth. But what does it mean? It means that we hold in our hands a book that combines lyricism with a sweep of a large historical vision. It means that strangeness of language here wakes us even if we put "stoppers in our ears" because even silence for this poet is a musical instrument. It means that in the couplets of this book clarity arises and the reader in America, the country that denies its own history, sees that 'point of Cassandra / is we struggle to stare directly at the light, its naked blaze.' Indeed. For me, Dubrow's brilliant book-long poem succeeds because it provides a myth for our time, a fable. How does she do it? 'To make a fable of this time, / I will say we were governed by a bird / who pecked decrees in the ground. Our park was a chaos of squawking.' Welcome to American Samizdat, dear reader. Behold the 21st-century world."

–Ilya Kaminsky

"American Samizdat emerges slowly. It emerges like an animal emerging from a fog so absolute it could be mistaken for a wall. It emerges like that same animal erupting into consciousness as it clears the fog—an evolutionary leap!—only to discover that the fog was internal. The animal, a creature that already knows the world, must also discover the world: 'For a time, I missed the sharing / as it’s known, the communal // passing around of news, small bites / I used to take of other lives.' In American Samizdat, we discover our world."

–Shane McCrae

“'Numbness is another way / of turning off the news,' Jehanne Dubrow writes in her deeply moving, terrifying, and necessary new collection, American Samizdat. In this brilliant, book-length series, Dubrow somehow gets at the root of our collective anxiety in a disintegrating America where meaning is merely 'the last pink light / that glows above a fence' and '[a]n alternative to fact is vertigo, / the floor rising up to strike my face.' American Samizdat will last as a marker of early 21st century America, a 'nation terrified,' a nation fed by technology and led by a mad man. 'I remember,' Dubrow writes, 'when threats // were given colors, red severe, / orange that the risk was high. // Now there is no chart.'

–Allison Benis White