Parachute

By Natalya Sukhonos

The poems of Parachute have an engaging, distinctive way of combining directness with invention: Natalya Sukhonos' imagination is attentive. -Robert Pinsky By both utilizing and transcending setting, Natalya Sukhonos' poetry takes the reader on a lyrical journey across disparate historical and geographical locations. With a novelist's penchant for storytelling and characterization, and a historian's precision, Parachute maps out the places that have shaped Sukhonos' and her family members: Russia, Ukraine, New York, San Francisco, rendering them intimate through painstaking attention to imagistic detail. This is a poet whose syntax is sure and whose empathy is pitch perfect. Sukhonos' world is terrifying and pretty, sublime in its capacity for awe. The poems in Parachute speak in the voice of dignity and justice of a shared humanity and a shared earth. One cannot read this manuscript without believing in the "sweetness and the cold imprint / Of humans and other animals / Turning their bodies to face the light." It is a gutsy, hard-won affirmation. -Cal Freeman, author of Brother of Leaving Transgressor: Natalya Sukhonos goes between, above and through language to arrive at the beautiful / ugly / essential and whether in Russian, English or conspiratorial Mexican idioms, she lures you into thinking her poetry is about the weekend afternoon in a modern city, not the smoke filled alley at the edge of a blighted winter where light itself is a kind of anthropomorphized co-conspirator. She takes you to this place directly in her poem "The City of Eyes"where "the dying fish, too big for its world, took away our vision, the vision of those who come to see light live in water and instead see time choking on itself." You will delight in her byzantine and almost modern, follow her closely as myth arises out of military equipment and reality succumbs to its own illusions. -Robert Lipton's book of poetry "A Complex Bravery" was published by Marick press. His work has appeared widely in a motley array of lightly read journals. He works as a spatial epidemiologist. These poems are small, courageous, necessary acts of vulnerability and joy. Ravished by the beauty of a simple rose, they become the rose, opening their fragile petals to us, disclosing "the cold imprint of humans and other animals / Turning their bodies to face the light." Like the parachuter of the title poem, they float down to us in the darkness without the protection of irony, bearing their white sails to our doorstep, "professing a love borne out of the pain / of leaving the earth." -Pattabi Seshadri

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 069267232X
• ISBN13: 9780692672327
• Release Date: May 2016
• Publisher: Aldrich Press
• Length: 58 Pages
• Weight: 0.03 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.1" x 6.0"