Carcanet scoops Russian-American poet Ostashevsky for first-time UK publication  

Carcanet Press will publish The Feeling Sonnets, an “exhilarating and witty” poetry collection from Russian-American poet Eugene Ostashevksy. It will be his first publication in the UK.  

Founder and managing director Michael Schmidt and associate publisher and editor John McAuliffe acquired UK and Commonwealth rights directly from the author. The collection will be published in the United States by NYRB Books. The Feeling Sonnets will be published in the UK on 28th July 2022.  

Ostashevsky explores Russian and American poetries by dislocating and recontextualising words, idioms, sentences and poetic conventions to expose the linguistic effects of migration. His collection includes four cycles of 14 unrhymed, unmetered sonnets. The first cycle asks about the relationship between interpretation and emotion, the second describes bringing up children in a foreign language, the third explores historical trauma and the fourth cycle is about translation. The central themes of the collection, running through each cycle, include fatherhood, translingualism, the siege of Leningrad and linguistic relativity.

Poet Gwyneth Lewis wrote: “Eugene Ostashevsky is a multilingual language explorer. His The Feeling Sonnets is an exhilarating and witty enquiry into the designs that language has on us as intellectual, domestic and historical beings. This is poetry as punning philosophy, both entertaining and deeply serious. This book is a tour de force, turning languages’ spotlights on to speech itself. Yet again, Carcanet is publishing important poetry.”