Born in the Wrong Desert

Description

Born in the Wrong Desert is Misha Tentser's debut chapbook poetry collection. Tentser writes "I'm a lost Jew born / in the wrong desert, / I feel my insides twist toward Jerusalem," Despite Tentser's apprehension, he steps back to examine the southwest desert that he carries from birth. Collecting the names of people and stories who helped make this desert his home. Steeped in story and poetic language, Tentser delivers a terse morsel of his world--Ukraine and Russian--adding yet another layer of cultural diversity and language into the richness that is the southwest.

Misha Tentser's Born in the Wrong Desert has all the best stuff you want in poems: Naked psychotic men at Burger King, Russians filleting salmon at Rincon Market, huevos rancheros at Benny's, twerking rabbis, dead friends dressed up like Kurt Cobain. The magic trick of these poems is to stitch the there to the here, the absent to the present. After Russia invades Ukraine the absent becomes only too present, with devastating consequences there but also here, in Misha, and we're left with him in the space between silence and stillness, singing the only song he can. It's a good one."--Ander Monson, author of I Will Take the Answer: Essays

Poetry. American. Russian & Soviet.