About this product

Product Identifiers

PublisherCoffee House Press

ISBN-10156689543X

ISBN-139781566895439

eBay Product ID (ePID)17038634725

Product Key Features

Book TitleWithout Protection

Number of Pages88 Pages

LanguageEnglish

Publication Year2019

TopicSubjects & Themes / Death, Grief, Loss, Russian & Former Soviet Union, Lgbt

IllustratorYes

GenrePoetry

AuthorGala Mukomolova

FormatTrade Paperback

Dimensions

Item Height0.2 in

Item Weight4.9 Oz

Item Length9 in

Item Width6 in

Additional Product Features

Intended AudienceTrade

LCCN2018-040453

Reviews"Oh, this delicious book, this steamy, soaring documentary fairy tale! Mukomolova''s erotic sensibility is refreshingly unmodified by sentimentality--raw, explicit, wounding, a hunger unmitigated by the banalities of love. She conjures lush, mythic spaces starring a queer-heroic maiden and an unappeasable witch-crone that are shot through with quotidian, retro-cool references to MySpace, Craigslist Missed Connections, and Lesley Gore''s ''You Don''t Own Me,'' just as her forms, improvisational, variegated, lacy, cleaved, give way to a prose line as solid as a knife-edge against stone. Mukomolova has given us a speaker whose wild embodiment is a revolt against displacement and trauma, who has the bravery to enter the witch''s house without protection and sit down at her table." --Diane Seuss "Without Protection is a wildly free and vulnerable collection in which no part of ecstatic, feminine pleasure or ache is taboo. The poems seem driven by a somatic urge to diverge from the constraints of one genre, instead successfully intersecting memoir, lyric experiment, fairy tale and fourth-wave feminist thought. In the ultimate act of liberation, Mukomolova has carved out a space for herself where Russian fairytales converse with the realities of being a queer, lesbian, femme, Russian immigrant who refuses invisibility and normative assimilation. Her words transport the lover, the thinker, the mystic, the muse." --Airea D. Matthews "Gala Mukomolova''s Without Protection is the world in its gorgeous terror and beauty, the world made whole, which is to say: the world as it is with its poverty, cruelty, and its crushing apathy. A world of wheelchairs, television screens, and Xanax. This collection shows both the internal and the external: the world of appearances and the roving whirr of the mind, the work of the intellect and the body covered in sweat and blood, the products made by these hands (sliced meat, a cup of tea, and this collection of poems itself) and the labor necessary to sustain a life in which such things can be made. Constructed from an archive of fragments (ephemera, email, voicemail), fairy tale, and stories, Mukomolova makes a world from the disparate scraps of a life lived, a world that she can embody. As she writes, ''I built a self outside my self.'' Without Protection is the triumphant arrival of a new and important voice." --Cynthia Cruz "Gala Mukomolova''s a Baltic Sea witch, and her poems are vulnerable, ferocious, sex-soaked, gems sharp-edged enough to cut. For Mukomolova, names are spells, and all the thousand shapes of love are Without Protection''s fierce gravity. ''Love made a clearing in the night where/a girl''s will tamped down the grass.'' Sometimes, the speaker is a teenage girl who laughs and fights and curses into the hot eye of the storms that pursue her (''What wasn''t dangerous?'') Sometimes, the speaker is a woman abandoned by a lover: hungry, desirous, despairing, suspicious, hilarious. Throughout, we trace Vasilyssa''s brave path through a perilous forest; ''If there is a kingdom then Vasilyssa comes.'' ''Goddess! Give me money!'' the old babas of Brighton Beach cry at the graves of their dead, and we all rejoice together." --Gina Balibrera Amyx Praise for Gala Mukomolova "Gala Mukomolova''s poems turn the volume of language up high and shake the cages of what has become our brutal ordinary. Her poem rattle us into what for me is a kind of beautiful profane, laying bare the complications of desire and simultaneously exposing personal and cultural wound. Hers in a poetry that refuses cloak in favor of reveal. And in pulling back the curtains, Mukomolova provides a tender cultural redress. These poems are a contemporary pulse, a vigilant all-seeing eye." --Dawn Lundy Martin, "Oh, this delicious book, this steamy, soaring documentary fairy tale! Mukomolova's erotic sensibility is refreshingly unmodified by sentimentality--raw, explicit, wounding, a hunger unmitigated by the banalities of love. She conjures lush, mythic spaces starring a queer-heroic maiden and an unappeasable witch-crone that are shot through with quotidian, retro-cool references to MySpace, Craigslist Missed Connections, and Lesley Gore's 'You Don't Own Me,' just as her forms, improvisational, variegated, lacy, cleaved, give way to a prose line as solid as a knife-edge against stone. Mukomolova has given us a speaker whose wild embodiment is a revolt against displacement and trauma, who has the bravery to enter the witch's house without protection and sit down at her table." --Diane Seuss "Gala Mukomolova's Without Protection is the world in its gorgeous terror and beauty, the world made whole, which is to say: the world as it is with its poverty, cruelty, and its crushing apathy. A world of wheelchairs, television screens, and Xanax. This collection shows both the internal and the external: the world of appearances and the roving whirr of the mind, the work of the intellect and the body covered in sweat and blood, the products made by these hands (sliced meat, a cup of tea, and this collection of poems itself) and the labor necessary to sustain a life in which such things can be made. Constructed from an archive of fragments (ephemera, email, voicemail), fairy tale, and stories, Mukomolova makes a world from the disparate scraps of a life lived, a world that she can embody. As she writes, 'I built a self outside my self.' Without Protection is the triumphant arrival of a new and important voice." --Cynthia Cruz Praise for Gala Mukomolova "Gala Mukomolova's poems turn the volume of language up high and shake the cages of what has become our brutal ordinary. Her poem rattle us into what for me is a kind of beautiful profane, laying bare the complications of desire and simultaneously exposing personal and cultural wound. Hers in a poetry that refuses cloak in favor of reveal. And in pulling back the curtains, Mukomolova provides a tender cultural redress. These poems are a contemporary pulse, a vigilant all-seeing eye." --Dawn Lundy Martin, "Oh, this delicious book, this steamy, soaring documentary fairy tale! Mukomolova's erotic sensibility is refreshingly unmodified by sentimentality--raw, explicit, wounding, a hunger unmitigated by the banalities of love. She conjures lush, mythic spaces starring a queer-heroic maiden and an unappeasable witch-crone that are shot through with quotidian, retro-cool references to MySpace, Craigslist Missed Connections, and Lesley Gore's 'You Don't Own Me,' just as her forms, improvisational, variegated, lacy, cleaved, give way to a prose line as solid as a knife-edge against stone. Mukomolova has given us a speaker whose wild embodiment is a revolt against displacement and trauma, who has the bravery to enter the witch's house without protection and sit down at her table." --Diane Seuss "Without Protection is a wildly free and vulnerable collection in which no part of ecstatic, feminine pleasure or ache is taboo. The poems seem driven by a somatic urge to diverge from the constraints of one genre, instead successfully intersecting memoir, lyric experiment, fairy tale and fourth-wave feminist thought. In the ultimate act of liberation, Mukomolova has carved out a space for herself where Russian fairytales converse with the realities of being a queer, lesbian, femme, Russian immigrant who refuses invisibility and normative assimilation. Her words transport the lover, the thinker, the mystic, the muse." --Airea D. Matthews "Gala Mukomolova's Without Protection is the world in its gorgeous terror and beauty, the world made whole, which is to say: the world as it is with its poverty, cruelty, and its crushing apathy. A world of wheelchairs, television screens, and Xanax. This collection shows both the internal and the external: the world of appearances and the roving whirr of the mind, the work of the intellect and the body covered in sweat and blood, the products made by these hands (sliced meat, a cup of tea, and this collection of poems itself) and the labor necessary to sustain a life in which such things can be made. Constructed from an archive of fragments (ephemera, email, voicemail), fairy tale, and stories, Mukomolova makes a world from the disparate scraps of a life lived, a world that she can embody. As she writes, 'I built a self outside my self.' Without Protection is the triumphant arrival of a new and important voice." --Cynthia Cruz Praise for Gala Mukomolova "Gala Mukomolova's poems turn the volume of language up high and shake the cages of what has become our brutal ordinary. Her poem rattle us into what for me is a kind of beautiful profane, laying bare the complications of desire and simultaneously exposing personal and cultural wound. Hers in a poetry that refuses cloak in favor of reveal. And in pulling back the curtains, Mukomolova provides a tender cultural redress. These poems are a contemporary pulse, a vigilant all-seeing eye." --Dawn Lundy Martin, Praise for Without Protection "Baba Yaga jumps the Brighton line in this rambunctious debut by poet and astrologer Mukomolova." -- Publishers Weekly "Mukomolova has given us a speaker whose wild embodiment is a revolt against displacement and trauma, who has the bravery to enter the witch's house without protection and sit down at her table." --Diane Seuss "Danger and vulnerability are ever-present in this debut collection, in which the mythic and the mundane strike against each other until something wholly other, a fire or a song, ignites." -- Academy of American Poets "What sets Mukomolova's poems apart is her appreciation of dyke beauty, an erotic beauty that is as gorgeous and gruesome as a whole hand unfurling inside a body like a tulip." -- Bomb " Without Protection is a wildly free and vulnerable collection in which no part of ecstatic, feminine pleasure or ache is taboo." --Airea D. Matthews "Grab a copy of [Mukomolova's] ferocious, ecstatic, thrumming collection, which vibrates with a divine feminine energy, an exquisite ache. . . . It's a feverish take on a fairy tale, and its ferocity lingers long after you've read the collection's last words." -- Nylon "A raw, unfiltered glimpse of different aspects of her world--which includes the beautiful, the vulnerable, and the sordid." -- Prism Review "An inquiry into what it means to live and love in a shared world . . . a set of poems that manages to be colossal and little all at once, personal and universal." -- The Adroit Journal "Constructed from an archive of fragments (ephemera, email, voicemail), fairy tale, and stories, Mukomolova makes a world from the disparate scraps of a life lived, a world that she can embody." --Cynthia Cruz "Gala Mukomolova's a Baltic Sea witch, and her poems are vulnerable, ferocious, sex-soaked, gems sharp-edged enough to cut. For Mukomolova, names are spells, and all the thousand shapes of love are Without Protection's fierce gravity." --Gina Balibrera Amyx "A young woman named Vasilyssa--buffeted by the brutal vestiges of tradition, by the animal frustrations of the body--sits at a table belonging to Baba Yaga, a fearsome witch-crone. For many of us, the encounter that follows may seem familiar." --Benjamin Quinn, Harvard Book Store "An intimate exploration of the dichotomy of the experienced and perceived self, the duality of Mukomolova's conservative Russian heritage and queer contemporary Jewish Americanness, and the strain within modernity between the mundane and the wondrous." --Lila Weller, Weller Book Works "Gala Mukomolova's poems turn the volume of language up high and shake the cages of what has become our brutal ordinary. . . . These poems are a contemporary pulse, a vigilant all-seeing eye." --Dawn Lundy Martin, "Oh, this delicious book, this steamy, soaring documentary fairy tale! Mukomolova's erotic sensibility is refreshingly unmodified by sentimentality--raw, explicit, wounding, a hunger unmitigated by the banalities of love. She conjures lush, mythic spaces starring a queer-heroic maiden and an unappeasable witch-crone that are shot through with quotidian, retro-cool references to MySpace, Craigslist Missed Connections, and Lesley Gore's 'You Don't Own Me,' just as her forms, improvisational, variegated, lacy, cleaved, give way to a prose line as solid as a knife-edge against stone. Mukomolova has given us a speaker whose wild embodiment is a revolt against displacement and trauma, who has the bravery to enter the witch's house without protection and sit down at her table." --Diane Seuss Praise for Gala Mukomolova "Gala Mukomolova's poems turn the volume of language up high and shake the cages of what has become our brutal ordinary. Her poem rattle us into what for me is a kind of beautiful profane, laying bare the complications of desire and simultaneously exposing personal and cultural wound. Hers in a poetry that refuses cloak in favor of reveal. And in pulling back the curtains, Mukomolova provides a tender cultural redress. These poems are a contemporary pulse, a vigilant all-seeing eye." --Dawn Lundy Martin

SynopsisIn poems rich with sensuality and discord, Mukomolova explores her complex identity--Russian, Jewish, refugee, New Yorker, lesbian-- through the Russian tale of Vasilyssa, a young girl left to fend for herself against the witch Baba Yaga. Heavy with family and fable, these poems are a beautiful articulation of difference under duress., Without Protection explores various parts of Gala's identity-her Russianness, her family ties, her sexuality, her immigrant experience-in an unapologetically feminist and sensual way, and a younger generation of readers will no doubt be interested in the questions of selfhood that she raises in her work.Gala's poetry is rigorous and inventive at once, and serious poetry readers will recognize the traditions of Tsvetaeva and Akhmatova here.Gala is the very popular horoscope writer for Nylon, and fans of her empathetic astrological observations will be excited for this new collection., From Russian fairytales to Craigslist ads, stories of identity, family, and sexuality are unraveled and woven anew in the poems of a woman caught between two worlds.

LC Classification NumberPS3613.U395A6 2019