In my head I heard melodies,
I deformed rhymes, misscanned syllables,
But I have no native language,
I can’t judge, I suspect I write garbage.

Originally from Leningrad, after a Brooklyn-based adolescence Eugene Ostashevsky went west, performed poetry, got a Ph.D., and helped found 9x9 industries in San Francisco, then came back to New York by way of Turkey. Eugene's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Best American Poetry 2005, Jubilat, Fence, Boston Review and other magazines. His translations of Alexander Vvedensky and Nikolai Zabolotskyhave appeared in American Poetry Review, Conjunctions and elsewhere. He is the editor of OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism from Northwestern University Press, available directly from the publisher here. He is also the author of Infinite Recursor or The Bride of DJ Spinoza, a collaboration with artist Eugene Timerman, also available from Ugly Duckling Presse here. He teaches at NYU.

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"Eugene Ostashevsky combines elements of the Russian Absurdists with a very contemporary and very American performance idiom. The result is a poetry at once witty, incantatory and slyly subversive. And a great, careening ride..."

— Michael Palmer

"Wow, this is just like Star Wars!"
" Yeah, but so much more fucked up!"

— two ten-year-olds

"Eugene Ostashevsky’s Iterature goes out of its way not to be too careful, reveling in off-rhyme, visual rhyme, and any other method of linguistic play that might push the poet’s language to the border of nonsense—or worse, incompetence. [...] A subterranean non-English grammar inform[s] his choices. [...] Not quite defeatist, he turns a wry, self-deprecating eye on everything and goes out of his way to dispel gravity."

—Brian Kim Stefans in The Boston Review