Gestures

Author: Artis Ostups 

Translator: Jayde Will

Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse (2018)

Gestures is a collection of prose poems connecting seemingly distinct elements, found either in urban space or in the realms of cultural history. Some readers, who had a chance to experience these ghostly constellations their original Latvian, complained that they cast a melancholic spell. Descriptions of landscapes and people pose no consoling effect, instead they function as darkened reflections of complex human emotions, trying to escape metaphysical abstractions. Cadence is there, but lyricism is not its master.