Paper-Thin Skin
Brings a young rising woman poet from Kazakhstan, who writes in Russian, to English readers for the first time;
Bilingual (Russian and English) poems on facing pages;
Russia is always in the news, but what of Kazakhstan? Here's a fresh, new, voice from a place few people know about, the ninth largest country in the world;
Recent Zephyr Russian and Eastern European titles have won or been short-listed for the National Book Critics Circle Award; the PEN USA Poetry in Translation Award, the Griffin International Poetry Prize; the National Translation Award; the Best Translated Book Award;
Poems have appeared in the literary journals and websites: The Atlanta Review, The Colorado Review, Chtenia, Cyphers, The Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, The St. Petersburg Review, Stand, Two Lines, and Words Without Borders. ,
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Translator is an award-winning poet and translator of Russian, French and Latin American literature.
Aigerim Tazhi (Айгерим Тажи) is one of the best-known contemporary Kazakh poets. She is the author ofБОГ-О-СЛОВ(THEO-LOG-IAN, which could also be read as GOD O' WORDS) (Musagetes, Kazakhstan, 2004) and the bilingual poetry bookБумажная кожа/Paper-Thin Skin(Russian-English, Zephyr Press, USA, 2019, translated by J. Kates). Tazhi won the International Literary Steps Prize in Poetry in 2003; in 2011, she was a finalist for the International Debut Prize in Poetry; in 2019, she was included in the prize list of the International Literary Poetry Award and named a finalist of the International Literary Voloshin Contest. Her work has been featured in many prominent literary magazines and anthologies; and her poems have been translated into English, French, Dutch, Polish, German, Armenian, Uzbek and other languages. In 2009 Tazhi created a continuing project of literary installations and performances, Visible Poetry. She lives in Almaty, Kazakhstan.
J. Kates is a poet, literary translator and co-director of Zephyr Press. The author of several collections of his own poetry, he is also the translator of more than a dozen books by Russian and French poets, including Tatiana Shcherbina, Mikhail Aizenberg, Mikhail Yeryomin, Aleksey Porvin, Jean-Pierre Rosnay, and Sergey Stratanovsky. He co-translated four books of Latin American poetry, was the translation editor of Contemporary Russian Poetry, and was the editor of In the Grip of Strange Thoughts: Russian Poetry in a New Era. He has been awarded three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, the Cliff Becker Book Prize in Translation, and a Käpylä Translation Prize.
