What We Saw From This Mountain

This is the first English-language collection of poetry by contemporary Russian poet, essayist, and prose writer Vladimir Aristov, a satellite figure of the Metarealist literary movement of the 1980s–90s. While the late Alexei Parshchikov and Arkadii Dragomoshchenko are somewhat better known to US readers, Aristov, who was their close friend, exemplifies both poets’ trajectories—his work explores metaphor-centered narrative poetry while assimilating American Language poetry and European postmodern theory. Aristov’s poetics is characterized by a philosophical thoughtfulness made more profound by his life-long work as a scientist, and by striking images that evoke the late poetry of Osip Mandelstam.