Alpha Donut

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Donut rolls out a pastiche of works from several serial projects (such as Writing in the Margin or The Bar Poems) and unpublished fragments that thread together swaths of stand-alone poems.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 and 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 and friends, drinks and 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, and love this book manifests over and 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, and why now I can't imagine life without it."—Dana Ward

"The most unsparing poets who live and write in New York absorb the city into their work, and Yankelevich stands in this tradition of the fast-talking, wry, and welcoming metropolitan poet. Even when he is harkening back to his Russian heritage, recalling '/ poem about exclamation points/ of rifles,' Yankelevich speaks and sees the world with the fragmented eye of a New Yorker, where 'a street/ is a country unto itself' and he can always 'hear the straining of the accordion/ in the last phrases of ‘Port Arthur.' ' Peppered with tiny, untitled missives that read like melancholy jottings on scrap paper ('stay away from me/ bar dog/ I'm trouble'), Yankelevich's is the work of a poet as much in love with language and conversation as he is with the world. He follows his nerve at every turn, offering up a list of choice Melvillean beers on one page ('Bartleby the Pilsener/ Billy Budweiser/ Benito Cervesa') and then misquoting Xerxes and moving into an exhausted, scrooged-out rant on the shortcomings of the New Yorkers around him on the next. Though his unsparing generosity might not always be pretty, it's certainly as honest as they come in New York. (June)" Publishers Weekly Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Matvei Yankelevich was born in 1973 in Moscow, USSR, from where his family emigrated to the Boston area in the late 1970s. He is the author of ALPHA DONUT (United Artists Books, 2012) and a previous book—a novella in fragments—BORIS BY THE SEA (Octopus Books, 2009), and several chapbooks: Writing in the Margin (Loudmouth Collective, 2001), The Present Work (Palm Press, 2006), The Nature Poetry of Matvei Yankelevich (Knock-Off, 2010), and Bending at the Elbow (Minutes Books). Yankelevich is a widely published translator of Russian poetry; his translations of the eccentric early 20th Century writer Daniil Kharms have appeared in many journals, including Harpers, The New Yorker, and NEW AMERICAN WRITING, and were collected in Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms (Overlook, 2007; Ardis/Overlook paperback, 2009). He has taught at the Russian Department of Hunter College, Columbia University School of the Arts, and the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. He is a member of the volunteer editorial collective of Ugly Duckling Presse, a nonprofit publisher based in Brooklyn, New York.