Born in 1941 and considered to be one of the founders of Moscow Conceptualism, Lev Rubinstein is among Russia's most well known contemporary poets living today. His work is mostly conceived as series of index cards, a poetic medium which he was inspired to create through his work as a librarian. His work was circulated through samizdat and underground readings in the "unofficial" art scene of the sixties and seventies, and found wide publication only in the late 1980s. Rubinstein lives in Moscow and writes cultural criticism for the independent media.

Catalogue's representative selection of Rubinstein's "note-card poems" (poetic texts originally written on a series of index cards), is published together with an informative introduction by the translator, and a short preface and afterward by the author himself, providing a context for those unfamiliar with Rubinstein's work, and a deeper vision for initiates.

"...At times like a realistic novel, at times like a dramatic play, at times like a lyric poem, etc., that is, it slides along the edges of genres and, like a small mirror, fleetingly reflects each of them, without identifying with any of them. This genre is, in essence, a hybrid genre, combining poetry, prose, drama, visual art, and performance."

These texts have been translated into German, French, Swedish, Polish, and now Rubinstein's card-catalog of "comedic novelties" has been opened—in a precise and sensitive translation—to the English reader.

Phil Metres is the author of two chapbooks of poetry: Primer for Non-Native Speakers (a chapbook, Kent State 2004) and Instants (after Eadweard Muybridge) (UDP, 2006). [link to INTSANTS on orders page] One of his poems appeared in Best American Poetry (2002). In His translation of one of Russia's most prominent contemporary poets, A Kindred Orphanhood: Selected Poems of Sergey Gandlevsky, is published by Zephyr Press. Metres has received fellowships from Thomas J. Watson Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, Ledig House, and the Ohio Arts Council. He lives in Cleveland, and is an assistant professor of English at John Carroll University, where he teaches American Literature and Creative Writing. He is a regular contributor to the radio show "WordPlay," on WJCU 88.7 FM.

Tatiana Tulchinsky is the co-translator of slain journalist Anna Polikovskaya's recent book A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya. Tulchinsky, who has translated and published numerous works into Russian and into English, is currently completing the Anthology of Russian Verse, 18th- 20th Century with Gwenan Wilbur. In 1998, she was awarded the AATTSEEL Prize for Best Translation from a Slavic or East European Language for her work with Marvin Kantor on Leo Tolstoy’s Plays in Three Volumes (Northwestern University Press).

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"Lev Rubinstein's note-card poems, here transcribed for the page and imaginatively translated by Philip Metres and Tatiana Tulchinsky, are an eye-opener! Their particular brand of conceptualism has affinities with our own Language poetry as well as with the French Oulipo, but its inflections are purely those of contemporary Russia—a country struggling to make sense to itself after decades of repression...We can literally read between the lines and construct a world of great pathos, humor—and a resigned disillusionment that will strike a resonant chord among American readers."

— Marjorie Perloff

"Lev Rubinstein's Catalogue of Comedic Novelties is a poetry of changing parts that ensnares the evanescent uncanniness of the everyday. By means of rhythmically foregrounding a central device—the basic unit of work is the index card—Rubinstein continuously makes actual a flickering now time that is both intimate and strange. Metres and Tulchinsky have created an engaging translation of a major work of contemporary Russian poetry. In the process, they have created a poem "in the American" and in the tradition of seriality associated with Charles Reznikoff and Robert Grenier."

— Charles Bernstein a Resurrects

"The major work by a major poet, one of the founders of Moscow Conceptualism, and aptly translated. There is no question that this is one of the 'must have' [poetry] books of 2004..."

—Ron Silliman

" Lev Rubinstein is the true heir of the OBERIU artists of the late 1920s. Like his most illustrious predecessor, Daniil Kharms, Rubinstein creates deadly serious, devastatingly funny comedy that incorporates a broad range of literary forms. In the precise translations of Philip Metres and Tatiana Tulchinsky, this witty and elegant work is available to an English-language public in its full glory for the first time."

—Andrew Wachtel

" At the end of the prose tract Democratic Vistas, Walt Whitman calls for a kind of book that is written "on the assumption that the process of reading is not a half sleep, but, in the highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast's struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself, must be on the alert, must himself or herself construct indeed the poem." Lev Rubinstein's Catalogue of Comedic Novelties is exactly this kind of book. It is interactive, engaging, and sometimes exhausting as a good workout should be. The reader is constantly implicated in the meaning making process of the poem, invited to fill in the blanks, to recreate the context from a series of intriguing and mysterious clues. Reading Rubinstein indeed strengthens one's imaginative muscles, but it is importantly a ludic as well as callisthenic activity. His poems are funny, utterly playful, "comedic" to use his own description, yet not without pathos.

— Michael Leong