The Feeling Sonnets

By: Eugene Ostashevsky

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Synopsis: Slyly funny, inventive, and virtuosic, this new collection from a Russian-American master challenges poetic convention and explores themes of alienhood, translation, and human emotion.In Eugene Ostashevsky&’s The Feeling Sonnets—his fourth collection of poems— words, idioms, sentences, and poetic conventions are dislodged and defamiliarized in order to convey the experience of living in a land, and a language, apart. The book consists of four cycles of fourteen unrhymed, unmetered sonnets. The first cycle asks about the relationship between interpretation and emotion, whether &“we feel the feelings that we call ours.&” The second cycle, mainly composed of &“daughter sonnets,&” describes bringing up children in a foreign country and a foreign language. The third cycle, called &“Die Schreibblockade,&” German for writer&’s block, talks about foreign-language processing of inherited historical trauma, in this case the siege of Leningrad from 1941 to 1944. The fourth cycle is about translation. The sonnets are followed by a short libretto, commissioned by the Italian composer Lucia Ronchetti, about Ravel&’s interaction with Paul Wittgenstein over the Piano Concerto for the Left Hand.