Aleksandr Skidan is one of Russia's most important contemporary poets. With language that is at once literary, cinematic, philosophical, journalistic, his innovative writing calls into question the distinction between poetry and philosophy. Skidan blurs and shifts the boundaries between the two as literary genres and as modes of discourse. His poetry is both lyrical and disjointed, addressing unflinchingly the literary and historical condition of post-Soviet Russia, engaging in continuous discourse with what Walter Benjamin would call the origins of the present crisis.

Genya Turovskaya is the author of Calendar (UDP 2002), and The Tides (Octopus Books 2007). Her poetry and translations of contemporary Russian poets have appeared in Chicago Review, Conjunctions, A Public Space, Octopus, jubilat, and other publications. Her translation of Aleksandr Skidan's Red Shifting was published by Ugly Duckling Presse (2008). She has been the recipient of various awards and fellowships including a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, a Montana Artist Refuge Fellowship, the Witter Bynner Translation Residency at Santa Fe Art Institute, and a Fund for Poetry grant. She holds an MFA from Bard College and lives in Brooklyn, New York where she is the Associate Editor of the Eastern European Poets Series at Ugly Duckling Presse.