Poetry. Translated from the Russian and with an introduction by Eugene Ostashevsky. "Hold it! How have we arrived at such a moment that could produce Dmitry Golynko's poetry? How has Soviet history remade itself, faster than dial-up, in the years that lead up to these wide open poems that document the very public culture it runs with? These darkly familiar serial poems cash-in the bankruptcy of the personal sentiment for the public outcry: 'chows down museli, pricey sashimi/cheap dried apricots/a mid-level manager adjusts his slacks.' Who knew? Indeed, this is how it is, AS IT TURNS OUT"--Robert Fitterman. Dmitry Golynko, born in 1969 in Leningrad, is one of the boldest linguistic innovators in Russian poetry today. A hard coming of age during the collapse of the Soviet system sensitized his ear to how language mutates in response to political and social change. The multilevel puns that saturated his writing in the 1990s fused the brand-consciousness of mass-market culture with recondite play of literary allusions. Particularly attuned to how language encodes power relations, Golynko creates a portrait of contemporary Russian life that is as darkly unsentimental as it is surgically precise. Golynko's first English-language release, AS IT TURNED OUT, features both earlier and more current poetry, drawing on the author's three books as well as internet and unpublished materials. The translators collaborated with the editor and the author to achieve the closest possible correspondence to the original Russian texts, all of which appear on facing pages.