American Samizdat

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, author of Deaf Republic

Jehanne Dubrow is the author of six books of poetry, including Dots & Dashes , winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award (Southern Illinois University Press, 2017). Her previous books are The Arranged Marriage (University of New Mexico Press, 2015), Red Army Red (Northwestern University Press, 2012), Stateside (Northwestern University Press, 2010), From the Fever-World (WWPH, 2010), and The Hardship Post (three candles press, 2009, Sundress Publications, 2013).

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