Description
Book SynopsisPaper-thin Skin is the debut collection by Aigerim Tazhi, who has broken ground as a Kazakhstani woman poet by gaining attention both in Russia and internationally. Fish, insects, birds, the sea, the sky, humans seeking connection, and death figure frequently in these succinct poems, as do windows, mirrors, and eyes: these are poems of observation and deep reflection. Tazhi gently insists that we look at words and the world “in the eye,” as she seeks to create what translator J. Kates calls a “mystic community of communication.”
Trade Review”For a debut poetry collection, Aigerim Tazhi’s Paper-Thin Skin is a work of stunning originality.“ — Elmira Elvazova, Massachusetts Review
“ This is a beautifully translated volume that neither exoticizes nor renders out the joy of reading poetry grounded in another place and language.” — Alison Mandaville, World Literature Today
“…[Tazhi's] poetry is enjoyable for the pure inventiveness of her images and observations. The collection is riddled with vivid, often intriguing images and witty one liners.” — Belinda Cooke, Poetry Salzburg Review
"Nevertheless, Central Asian literature in English translation remains rare and since Tazhi’s current home of Almaty is equidistant between the capitals of Russia and China, a leading Kazakh poet, for such Tazhi evidently is, deserves to be read as much to her East as to her West. — Peter Gordon, Asian Review of Books
"A beautiful bilingual book, produced with care and attention to white space around the poems, Paper-Thin Skin speaks to layers of loss–from personal and private to the loss of the country (I read these poems in the post-Soviet context) to climate change and the loss of habitats." — Olga Zilberbourg, Punctured Lines
Table of ContentsTranslator's Introduction: Aigerim Tazhi's Temple of Words
1
Walking like a camel
Where is it, where is what moves forward?
The trees know it is early to wake up.
In the depth of a mirror mottled with stains
The wind makes a measured noise.
There is a certain rhythm in anxiety.
Summer, organize a soundless holiday with a forest at night.
Hidden behind a gray facade,
Ivy. I gathered it on the river bank.
In the house a window
Rain ran over a keyboard of leaves.
I strain to listen for an imagined world:
Hands reach out. You hide yourself deep down.
A tree, keeping in balance,
Oh, why, from where to where
A purple window. A yellow one.
After I caught a conversation in the park,
When the narrator nods off on a mountain of books,
A runner with a flashlight in his head
Windows opening to the east
In open maps the future
. . . and somewhere everyday life turned into a miracle
I want to float downstream
2
A warm center floats up from the skin.
Probably a god is like a dying person
People carry dirt under their nails,
Don’t take one last breath — nothing to breathe here.
Earth, dying on the eve of winter,
Someone among the branches
It seems the more room
Over the heads of shriveled apples
Music in the heart gnawing and gnawing.
You are standing on the edge of a cloud,
The sea has enormous lungs
It can take time to choose a beautiful crab
Underneath, in a German-chocolate box
Heavier than age
Wrap up warm —
A morning crossroads. Tea freezes in a little cup.
On the overhang of the entrance
The natives hide a yellow cobra in baskets of bananas,
Tomorrow twenty above
Where is the tail of the fish
A violet sucks up from a saucer yesterday's sea filtered through the earth.
Somebody died.
Sleepless in Tibet just like those here
3
The aircraft of a dragonfly over the river.
The old tree has young leaves.
Slowly revealing itself
Head on shoulders. A shroud on the head.
The sky is a closed window.
To pour out a little from an overflowing heart
On the road people seem eternal
Like a face in a clinic an angel in white
A step away from the epicenter. An unlit courtyard.
The morning is pecked by birds
Wind in the room. rain
Trying other people's heads
A grim game on the rim.
In a sandbox under the playground mushroom
When the memory is not the same and hands are not the same
From resurrection to sunday
A flock of crows from the shores of the horizon
This city is flooded in a radiant glow
First a flood and finally a fly-boy
The house-ark sheets swelled like sails
God
Pushed away from an old ship
When the body dies, eagles and fish dine well,
First at a call a large lion's
Notes
Biographical Notes
