Poetry. ALPHA DONUT: The Selected Shorter Works of Matvei Yankelevich collects poems and prose texts written over the course of the first eleven years of the millennium. Alpha Donut rolls out a pastiche of works from several serial projects (such as Writing in the Margin or The Bar Poems) and unpublished fragments that thread together swaths of stand-alone poems. Many of these pieces have appeared in progressive literary journals and little magazines. They are now, for the first time, gathered together in a practical volume for fans and newcomers alike. "Matvei Yankelevich is a wonderful poet—wonderful in the sense that he is not, to the least degree, enigmatic but always simply and humanly mysterious.... One of my favorite younger poets, he deserves a wide and generous readership in this land fitfully struggling for some sort of smart redemption."—Anselm Hollo "I feel incredibly close to this book because, in picturing a life lived through writing, it never abdicates the knot of ambivalence &amp; ecstasy such a life necessarily entails. So much of what I love lives here—Mandelstam's ghost, the doomsday clock cigarette that burns throughout the book, cities &amp; friends, drinks &amp; readings. Yet ALPHA DONUT's poems are so prepossessing exactly because they're so restless where affinity is concerned. Matvei registers all the ways in which our affection for anything is often mystifyingly the ground of our trouble. The idea that we seem to be getting from culture, that liking things is somehow equivalent to knowing them, is in every way refuted by the humor, inquiry, &amp; love this book manifests over &amp; over. While the language is clear, its clarity is turned to sing through something elementally illegible foundering in the depths of our feeling: 'This text is written on buttons / so tightly sewn / to each other that no one / can read it.' That's really why I feel so bonded to this book, &amp; why now I can't imagine life without it."—Dana Ward

Alpha Donut

Literature & Fiction

Yankelevich, Matvei

Poetry

United Artists Books

Poetry. Matvei Yankelevich's first full-length book, BORIS BY THE SEA, is a work of existential theater that destroys the distance between puppeteer and puppet, between ego and id, between what is real and what is absurd. Consisting of prose, poems, and plays, the book creates its own world and then confronts the loneliness of having to exist within one's own creation. Like Daniil Kharms, Yankelevich has written a children's book for only the bravest of adults. "Boris is a precarious creature thrown into a world he is ill-suited for—a bit like Monsieur Plume and other relatives. The world was 'somewhere inside his skull. And it hurt.' These poems and dramatic sketches, however, delight even when they hurt."—Rosmarie Waldrop "BORIS BY THE SEA was born when Aesop was reading Chekhov, and Chekhov was reading Nietzsche, and Nietzsche was watching The Brother from Another Planet. Actually Matvei Yankelevich wrote this book, but 'wrote' is incomplete...he seems more to inhabit this stateless, beautiful being who uses language to move his body or erase the sea: 'Boris looked over himself and realized there were many parts of him that he could not see. And only a small part of these parts was on the surface.' BORIS BY THE SEA could be a children's fable if it weren't so freakin' real, unreal, hyper-real: 'But people need each other to open each other up and see what is inside.' This is Boris—and he, like Pinocchio—has a clever master."—Robert Fitterman

Boris by the Sea

Octopus Books

Poetry. "Matvei Yankelevich is a fabulist. In his excellent new book he is singing 'a world in a flash of contours.' The voice is dynamic, and performs in a syncretic register: lyric, narrative, citation, essay, and vaudeville are all present and doing important work to expose us to 'the animation of f-stops.' SOME WORLDS FOR DR. VOGT is a spirited investigation by a truly original and fantastic poet."—Peter Gizzi "In this suite of forty-five poems and occasional epigraphic interpolations, Matvei Yankelevich posits worlds, each an instant of place in motion. Time, site, transience: these are the indelibles of world life. And, as such, under Yankelevich's observant eye and working hand and co-passionate mind, these world instants are closely observed and vastly imagined. For Yankelevich, worlds are intimate challenges. His poems reciprocate. They are inviting—and 'you' to whom the invitation is proffered (o world, o reader, o stranger, o history and now and lock of hair and bee) will find yourself welcomed into conditions that are unnerving and familiar and exquisite."—Lyn Hejinian

Some Worlds For Dr. Vogt

Black Square Editions

About the Author\nMatvei Yankelevich is a poet, translator, and editor whose books include SOME WORLDS FOR DR. VOGT (Black Square Editions, 2015), ALPHA DONUT (United Artists Books, 2012), BORIS BY THE SEA (Octopus Books, 2009), and, most recently, the chapbook From a Winter Notebook (Alder & Frankia). His translations from Russian include Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms (Overlook) and, with Eugene Ostashevsky, Alexander Vvedensky's An Invitation for Me to Think (NYRB Poets), which received the 2014 National Translation Award. He has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the National Endowment for Humanities. In the 1990s, he co-founded Ugly Duckling Presse where he edited, designed, and produced a variety of books, chapbooks, periodicals, and broadsides, co-edited 6x6 magazine, and curated the Eastern European Poets Series. He teaches translation and book arts at Columbia University's School of the Arts.\nThese twenty-seven poems of DEAD WINTER continue the poet's ongoing "From a Winter Notebook" cycle which plays on traditional winter themes of stasis, ruin, aging, lost love, belatedness, dormancy, and decline. Aggressively personal, by turns ironic and sentimental, mixing colloquial and archly artificial diction, rife with quotations and reference to a wide variety of lyric traditions, these poems stage a polyphonic and ambivalent internal dialog that vacillates between the often-contradictory desires of social justice and personal freedom. Straining to resist impending erosion in the political tide, the singular voice seeks to hold these contradictions up to the light and to contemplate their prismatic refractions without resolution. Caught between complicity and antagonism, between the impending obsolescence of inherited poetic traditions and a desire to commune with the contemporary, the voice churns on--miming winter's monotony--to carve out a space for melancholic complaint and anxious meditation on the end-times endeavor of the lyric mode itself. Through representations of desire and melancholy in a technologically invasive era, these poems also ask about the effect of technological and political shifts on the bounds of the personal, and of the way a techno-oriented sociality impinges on interpersonal relationships, the interior dialogs of the self, and the writing of poetry. 
Poetry.\nBook Description\nAggressively personal, ironic, mixing colloquial and arch, outmoded diction, Matvei Yankelevich's DEAD WINTER invokes the privacy and the self-reflexive performance of notebook writing, carving out a space for melancholic complaint and anxious meditation on the end-times endeavor of the lyric mode itself.

Dead Winter

Fonograf Editions

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Books by Yankelevich, Matvei

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Yankelevich, Matvei. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Alpha Donut

Boris by the Sea

Some Worlds For Dr. Vogt

Dead Winter