The Off-centaur

Literature & Fiction

Ostashevsky, Eugene

Poetry

Poetic Research Bureau

The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza is a cycle of fast, tragic, unsettling, hilarious poems about the shortcomings of reason. Eugene Ostashevsky’s book responds to The Ethics of the seventeenth-century philosopher B. Spinoza, a work that seeks to construct an axiomatic system that is a theory of everything in a natural form of language with all its inconsistencies and ambivalence.
“1.”
Dear Owl you have big eyes feathers that stick in all different directions you wake up your panties are funny You hear the sounds words make as they plead for life that’s all that remains of the language of language Eugene Ostashevsky is the author of Iterature (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2005) and eight chapbooks. He is also the editor and main translator of OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism (Northwestern University Press, 2006). A recipient of fellowships from the Witter Bynner Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts, Ostashevsky teaches at New York University.

The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza (Eastern European Poets Series)

Zephyr Press

An original collection from one of the most active poets in contemporary literature. Winner of the 2019 International Poetry Prize from the City of Münster The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi is a poem-novel about the relationship between a pirate and a parrot who, after capturing a certain quantity of prizes, are shipwrecked on a deserted island, where they proceed to discuss whether they would have been able to communicate with people indigenous to the island, had there been any. Characterized by multilingual punning, humor puerile and set-theoretical, philosophical irony and narrative handicaps, Eugene Ostashevsky’s new large-scale project draws on sources as various as early modern texts about pirates and animal intelligence, old-school hip-hop, and game theory to pursue the themes of emigration, incomprehension, untranslatability, and the otherness of others.

The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi (NYRB Poets)

Dramas & Plays

NYRB Poets

Slyly funny, inventive, and virtuosic, this new collection from a Russian-American master challenges poetic convention and explores themes of alienhood, translation, and human emotion.\nIn Eugene Ostashevsky’s The Feeling Sonnets—his fourth collection of poems— words, idioms, sentences, and poetic conventions are dislodged and defamiliarized in order to convey the experience of living in a land, and a language, apart. The book consists of four cycles of fourteen unrhymed, unmetered sonnets. The first cycle asks about the relationship between interpretation and emotion, whether “we feel the feelings that we call ours.” The second cycle, mainly composed of “daughter sonnets,” describes bringing up children in a foreign country and a foreign language. The third cycle, called “Die Schreibblockade,” German for writer’s block, talks about foreign-language processing of inherited historical trauma, in this case the siege of Leningrad from 1941 to 1944. The fourth cycle is about translation. The sonnets are followed by a short libretto, commissioned by the Italian composer Lucia Ronchetti, about Ravel’s interaction with Paul Wittgenstein over the Piano Concerto for the Left Hand.

The Feeling Sonnets (Nyrb Poets)

Poetry. "Eugene Ostashevsky combines elements of the Russian Absurdists with a very contemporary and very American performance idiom. The result is a poetry at once witty, incantatory and slyly subversive. And a great, careening ride..."--Michael Palmer. "Eugene Ostashevsky's Iterature goes out of its way not to be too careful, reveling in off-rhyme, visual rhyme, and any other method of linguistic play that might push the poet's language to the border of nonsense--or worse, incompetence. [...] A subterranean non-English grammar inform[s] his choices. [...] Not quite defeatist, he turns a wry, self-deprecating eye on everything and goes out of his way to dispel gravity"--Brian Kim Stefans in The Boston Review.

ITERATURE (Eastern European Poets Series, 10)

United States

Ugly Duckling Presse

The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza is a cycle of fast, tragic, unsettling, hilarious poems about the shortcomings of reason. Eugene Ostashevsky’s book responds to The Ethics of the seventeenth-century philosopher B. Spinoza, a work that seeks to construct an axiomatic system that is a theory of everything in a natural form of language with all its inconsistencies and ambivalence.“1.”Dear Owlyou have big eyesfeathers that stick in all different directionsyou wake upyour panties are funnyYou hearthe sounds words makeas they plead for lifethat’s all that remainsof the language of languageEugene Ostashevsky is the author of Iterature (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2005) and eight chapbooks. He is also the editor and main translator of OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism (Northwestern University Press, 2006). A recipient of fellowships from the Witter Bynner Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts, Ostashevsky teaches at New York University.

The Life and Opinions of Dj Spinoza

Ugly Duckling Pr

Poetry. Art. THE PIRATE WHO DOES NOT KNOW THE VALUE OF PI, PART I is a nine-poem, eleven-image extravaganza about communication challenges affecting the relationship between a pirate and a parrot. Can they work it out? Never mind them! Can you work it out? Do you like visuals made of parts whose some is less than the all? Can you handle multilevel multilingual punning and mesostic action that keeps hitting below the borscht belt? The Eugenes&mdash;past collaborators on INFINITE RECURSOR and THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF DJ SPINOZA&mdash;have again got your number.

The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of PI, Part 1

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Books by Ostashevsky, Eugene