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Stranger at Home

"The prose of Russian-American poet Andrey Gritsman combines a physician’s probing glance with an immigrant’s inquisitive mind and a sensitivity honed by transcultural and translingual experience."

—  Adrian J. Wanner, Liberal Arts Professor of Slavic Languages and Comparative Literature, Pennsylvania State University

"In the tradition of Yuri Zhivago, Andrey Gritsman is a poet as well as a physician, whose work with the written word is morally continuous with the practice of medicine. He has championed the cause of 'intercultural poetics'—the idea that, for example, American and Russian poetry can enrich one another. Andrey's new book, Stranger at Home, is a fascinating collection of essays, poems, and prose poems. As a translator of 'silver age' poets such as Mandelstam, Andrey has much to teach us. He addresses himself to the perils and pleasures of writing 'poetry in diaspora' (as did Nabokov and Brodsky). There are so many highlights in Strangers at Home that it is difficult to choose among them."​

—  David Lehman, author of New and Selected Works (Scribner), Founder and Editor-in-Chief of the Best American Poetry Series, Professor, New School

 

"Bringing together works of prose and essays, this collection demonstrates the variety of Gritsman’s writing. He is a good connoisseur of contemporary Russian literature in exile and the art of translation, being also a sharp observer of American life. He writes personal essays about his past in Communist Russia as a doctor and cultural persona in the new world, along with essays about Marina Tsvetaeva, Paul Celan, Osip Mandelstam, T.S Eliot, and Brodsky. Poet of intercultural space, moving with ability between literature and medicine, Andrey Gritsman draws an artistic road map of his emigration, dilemmas, and fulfillment in his adoptive country."

—  Carmen Firan, author of Words and Flesh

About the Author

Andrey Gritsman, a native of Moscow, immigrated to the United States in 1981. He a physician who is also a poet and essayist and have published six volumes of poetry in Russian.  He received the 2009 Pushcart Prize Honorable Mention XXIII and was nominated for the Pushcart Prize several times 2005–2008, and also was on the Short List for PEN American Center Biennial Osterweil Poetry Award. 

Poems, essays, and short stories in English have appeared or are forthcoming in over 70 literary journals, including Left Curve, Nimrod International Journal, Blue Mesa, Cadillac Cicatrix, Confrontation, Cimarron Review, Euphony, Hiram Poetry Review, Hotel Amerika, New Orleans Review, New Zoo Poetry Review, Notre Dame Review, Wisconsin Review, Carquinez Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, Epicenter, Hawaii Review, Hunger Mountain, The Hurricane Review, Permafrost, Phantasmagoria, Poet Lore, Poetry International, Post Road, Puerto del Sol, Reed Magazine, Richmond Review (London), Fortnight (N. Ireland, UK), Landfall (New Zealand), Ars Interpres (Stockholm, Sweden), The South Carolina Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, and The Writer's Chronicle. The work has been anthologized in Modern Poetry in Translation (UK), Crossing Centuries (New Generation in Russian Poetry), The Breath of Parted Lips: Voices from the Robert Frost Place, in Stranger at Home: American Poetry with an Accent, in Twenty Years after the Fall, Perfect Crime Anthology and in Token Entry: New York City Subway Poems. Poetry collection LONG FALL was published by Spuyten Duyvil, PISCES by Numina Press, LIVE LANDSCAPE by Cervena Barva Press, and collection GREATEST HITS by Pudding House Press.

 

He edits the international poetry magazine INTERPOEZIA (www.interpoezia.net) in Russian and hosts the Intercultural Poetry Reading Series at Cornelia Street Café in New York.

GRITSMAN

New Meridian Arts

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