Reviews

 

Indeed, the insistent repetition of key phrases is one of Yusupova’s most common, and most effective, poetic devices. In spite of their formal looseness, her poems are tightly wrought artworks; they are poems first and documents second. The devastating impact of her montage technique is evident in a verdict-poem hinging on the interplay of harrowing facts presented in dry legal language (“he took a wooden stick and thrust it with force into her vagina,” “then he withdrew this stick on it were G.’s intestines”), and the judge’s finding that “the vagina is not a vital organ,” which informed his decision to convict the accused of “grievous bodily harm leading to death through negligence” rather than murder although his actions resulted in “the death of the victim.” Yusupova’s presentation makes the reader feel queasy in a way reading the court document would not, and queasiness is an appropriate response, toward the crime itself as well as to the verdict. Art is supposed to make us feel.

Josephine von Zitzewitz

 

 

The bodies in this book have vaginas and penises, they suffer from dog bites and rape and mental illness and brutal murder, they deliver dead children and alive children that they don’t know what to do with; and they experience occasional bursts of joy, those, too, provoked by the physical bodily sensations: a touch, a look, a good fuck. The poet brings the dead close to us and allows us to grieve for the ways they died, no matter how far away and long ago. Yusupova frequently draws on the language of news reports and court summaries, transforming our relationship with the bureaucratese. In English, her translators juxtapose vocabulary from different registers and patterns of speech and incorporate Russian to insist that the reader looks closely at the subjects of these poems in both their familiarity and uniqueness.

Olga Zilberbourg

 

The poems are a record of violence, but there is a bright line that shines through to happiness that is found in community. The interweaving of these opposite emotions is what makes the poems strong. They are records of lives lived and lives interrupted. They are histories that beg not to be repeated. They are scars that reveal the past but also beg to be avoided in the future.

Olena Jennings

 

The title of Yusupova’s The Scar We Know is taken from her poem “the scar we’ve known about from the very beginning,” about a friend who heard voices. Yusupova didn’t know until it was too late, and she blames herself for having failed to prevent his suicide. Not all scars are visible; sometimes the most important wounds are the ones that are hidden. Though Yusupova doesn’t go in for Twitter-style irony, in its frankness and sense of resilience, her poetry has something in common with Patricia Lockwood’s famous poem “Rape Joke,” in which she writes: “Time is different, becomes more horrible and more habitable, and accommodates your need to go deeper into it./Just like the body, which more than a concrete form is a capacity.” Stories, especially testimony, of sexual assault and harassment have unusual currency in our society at this moment. On several continents, writers are asking what happens when accounts of crimes are turned into poetry, and when the writer’s body is brought to the center of the story.

Sophie Pinkham