Day of the Border Guards

“Katherine E. Young’s Day of the Border Guard is very much about crossing borders—those between reality and, in this case, Russia. Which is to say she offers us a Russia of direct experience and the transformed country of the imagination. Her text is dense with marvellous detail, dramatic intensity, and intentions that are unmistakable in their insight and judgment. Young chooses to represent both herself and the voices of various personae, sometimes, in fact, as one blended voice: hers and Akhmatova, hers and Mandelstam.”-Stanley Plumly, author of Orphan Hours: Poem

""In Day of the Border Guards, Katherine Young examines what it means to be a poet of witness. And what she's a witness to happens to be nothing less than the Soviet Union before the fall. Hers is a journey haunted by the ghosts of Pushkin and Bulgakov (""I could be myself, or any one / of Pushkin's women, or Margarita walking / the alleys with yellow flowers in her arms""), the ghosts of dissident poets like Osip Mandelstam, and the personal ghosts of romantic disappointment and philosophical doubt (is she a witness who sees but feels nothing? or is she unable to see at all?). Young's odyssey is staggering in its scope and vision, but poetry lives in the details and here there are innumerable places where the poetry simply takes your breath away. In ""Nearing Chernobyl,"" for example, Young writes: ""For there's enchantment aplenty here: / the cold wheeling of comets, breath / of the sun howling down on the rump / of a woman peeing by a tree in Ukraine. / I carry the dust of the universe on my shoes."" Lines any poet—even Pushkin or Lermontov or Mandelstam—would be proud of."" -John Surowiecki, author of Flies