Katherine Young’s Day of the Border Guards was recently reviewed in Poet Lore:
Young lived in Moscow during those last days of the Soviet empire, when the country ran on rubberbands and spit. Winters were brutal. Centralized heating was about as effective as the centralized government: when uninsulated pipes ruptured, people burned to death—and all the pipes were uninsulated. These poems are bone-chilling: looking out her window, Young sees “leafless birches // shivering the ice-covered court yard” (“Centralized Heating”). But Russia isn’t all about bad weather and feeling out of place. And Young’s poetry is anything but drab and dreary. This is also a world of vodka, tea, and hand-knotted rugs. In fact, the poems are so deeply imbued with Russianness that Young might be a Russian poet herself, very ably translated by the American poet Katherine Young! There’s such a sense of authenticity—a familiarity with the environment, the people, and the great Russian writers themselves—that the reader never feels these are travel poems.
Young’s eye is especially attuned to landscape, which accounts for many rich, lush descriptions…
This is Russia, a land of hope and a land of despair. Katherine Young captures both in language vivid, precise, and surprising. As she writes in “Speaking Russian,” “The antechamber of learning is the knowledge of languages.
And Jo McDougall’s collected poems In the Home of the Famous Dead was reviewed in North American Review:
In the Home of the Famous Dead proves Jo McDougall the reigning virtuoso of the small lyric in English, able to capture deep human emotion and knowledge in very few words. Here’s “Visiting My Daughter”: “For weeks / I visited every day, / drawn to that fresh rise, / the blister of her grave.” The poem seems intent on delivering a happy ending but then death comes. The story of all our lives. Again and again, throughout these twenty-seven years of poems, McDougall delivers unsentimental truths in exceedingly well-written poems like jewels or small clockworks. Brava, Jo. Read this book friends.