Galina Rymbu’s poems employ history as a discursive tool to understand the present—stories of revolution, movement in time and space, life, and livelihood emerge. Rymbu seeks a radical feminist and leftist poetics that does not condescend to the oppressed, but rather embraces the complexity of every emotion and political position, and of language itself. She opens her poetry to the violence of propaganda, biopolitical manipulation, ideological pressures, as well as the violence of personal intimacy.
Life in Space is Rymbu’s first full-length collection in English translation and includes poems selected from her three books as well as more recent work. Life in Space is translated by Joan Brooks, and includes additional material translated by Helena Kernan, Charles Bernstein and Kevin M.F. Platt, and Anastasiya Osipova (with Marijeta Bozovic, Catherine Ciepiela, Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, Pavel Khazanov, Mila Nazyrova, Eugene Ostashevsky, Val Vinokur, and Michael Wachtel), and a preface by Eugene Ostashevsky. This book is a co-production with After Hours Editions, who published Rymbu’s first English-language chapbook, White Bread.