Earthly Lexicon by Regina Derieva
Selected poems and prose translated by various hands
Preorder Paperback from Marick Press
Publication Date: Fall 2019
158 pages
ISBN13: 978-1-934851-73-9 
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Copies of this book can also be ordered
from Sweden

“The Russian poet Regina Derieva was born in Odessa on the Black Sea, and enjoyed the shifting rhythms of the sea: ‘Water is the ideal apparel.  However many times you get into it, it’s the same’.  Her passion for water was shared by her epistolary friend, Joseph Brodsky, who grew up alongside St. Petersburg’s canals and spent as much time as he could in Venice, where he is buried on the cemetery island of San Michele.  Derieva, whom Brodsky called 'a great poet’, viewed a very different landscape, however: from the age of sixteen she lived obscurely in Karaganda, Kazakhstan, ‘perhaps the most dismal corner of the former Soviet Union – once the centre of a vast prison camp universe, later just a gloomy industrial city’, according to the distinguished Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova.  For him, Derieva’s precise, epigrammatic poems limn ‘the concentration camp zone, where space is turned into emptiness, and time turned into disappearance’.”
(The Times Literary Supplement) 

Then followed nine fruitful years in Palestine and fourteen (not less productive) in Sweden, alternating with trips to various places around the globe.  Between 2002 and 2007 Regina visited the USA often; now, in the present book, her cycle of poems, “Northeast States”, is made available in its entirety.
Regina Derieva, who died in Stockholm in 2013, was not only a poet, but a prose writer, translator, musician and enthusiastic amateur conchologist.  This third American collection of her poems also contains essays, prose pieces and the unfinished “The Normal Chaos of Things”.

Translators:
Ilya Bernstein, Alex Cigale, Julia Istomina, Nadia Kalman, Ilya Kaminsky,
Valzhyna Mort, Richard Reisner, Alan Shaw, Daniel Weissbort and Augustus Young