Katia Kapovich ^People

She emigrated from the Soviet Union where she had been a member of a lite- rary dissident movement, in 1990. She lives and works in Cambridge, Mass. with her husband, the poet Philip Nikolaiev and their child Sophia. In 1993 and 1994 she taught Russian Literature at Boston College.Her poems are tiny narratives, exquisitely crafted, rhymed and quite complex. Her first book Den' Angela i Noch' (Day and Night of the Angel), was published in Israel in 1992, and the poems in this collection written in the 1990s come from that book. She also writes fluently in English which proves that Katia Kapovich is that rarest of poets: one who is bilingual. Her interest in narrative poetry (she wrote a non-Soviet long poem at the age of eight) led to a book-length poem, Sufler (The Prompter, 1998) and to the statement that ifMandelstam had survived he would have written a brilliant narrative poem. It is Mandelstam in particular who shines through her poetry and in another English poem. It is always exciting to find a new living poet, totally original, but with echoes of past voices and with astrongresonance of survival. Katiaonce e-mailed me that if she doesn't write for a long time she feels il.Her second book, Proschanie s Shestikrylymi (Farewell to the Six-Winged, 2001 - a reference to the six-winged seraph in Pushkin's poem The Prophet). which is an equally rich collection, has been followed by Perekur (Smoke- Break, 2002).