John High

From The Village Voice Literary Supplement's
Top 25 Books of the Year:

“In what is best described as a book length prose poem, he [John High] attempts to uncover the un-narrative that lies beneath all tales of loss and redemption. In this tale set in Russia, he moves unhesitatingly across centuries, fusing the spiritual travails of the Middle Ages with the economic woes of post-Soviet life. This self-reflexive tour de force reminds us that high art need not be free of religious and political ideation. His prose gives the lie to the distinctions between poetry and fiction; its intricately gnomic language suggests the eternal and the apocalyptic almost offhandedly, without resorting to elaborate stagecraft. High conjures dreamscapes which retain the bracing tactility of the real: 'When the earth turned to salt and the skies came down to meet them. An almost beige sun. Some flecks of dust lifting off the thinly disguised road as the lovers walk past. A man and woman walking toward the sea. Black lizards and frogs flickering across the fields to the ritual noise of gunfire.'"

From Publishers Weekly:

“Abstract, vivid and difficult, this harrowing first novel from PW contributing editor High (The Sasha Poems) combines metaphysical speculation with attention to the landscape and religion of Russia. High's three segments entitled 'The Book of Mistranslations,' 'A Face of Desire' and 'The Monks Overlooking the Story' describe the recurrence and survival of human desire under the most adverse conditions. Fragments of letters, dialogues, prose poems and descriptive passages bleed into one another to follow a pair of young lovers and a pair of monks, whose travails, though focused on the present, take place over a 1000-year arc of Russian history. The unnamed lovers suffer extreme deprivation in the metaphysical Siberia of contemporary Russia, a place defined by cold, cancer, morphine and nausea. Struggling to stay together, trying to connect through body, word and writing, the lovers are sustained in their secular journey by the monks Peter and Ezekiel, who, High suggests, have been repeatedly reincarnated, always looking for ways to heal each other's pain. An epigraph from Simone Weil resonates with other gnomic prose throughout the novel, invoking an unseen, perpetually ramifying 'event' all human beings must choose to accept...”

From Library Journal:

"High is a poet (Sasha Poems) and translator of Russian poetry, so it's not surprising that this latest work is dominated by its dense, poetic language and haunting imagery. Not quite a novel, the book is more a series of scenes and notations by refugees of the collapsing Russian empire. Whether it's set during the Revolution or much later isn't clear, nor does it really matter, for the sense of loss, rootlessness, and the horrors of war remain the same no matter what the time period..."
From Poetry Flash:
"Trance-Siberian Express" reviewed by Gary Gach

“The collapse of the soviet bloc was one of the most
decisive events of the past century. But where shall we turn for in-depth testimony?

"Western publishers have offered us literary journalism, mostly by outsiders, from David Remnick's Pulitzer Prize-winning Lenin's Tomb to Mark Kramer's masterful but under-recognized Travels with a Hungry Bear. But outsiders can sometimes see the game better than the players. And poetry and fiction can provide a truthful witness (and reportage be charged with poetry).

"Acclaimed American poet-translator John High has recently offered up a text woven during several years teaching and translating in the ex-USSR, in the early '90s. Surprise!, his report's resonant not only with political upheaval but with a more under-reported phenomenon: spiritual reawakening.

"A swirl of prose and prose-poetry, Notebooks opens in medias res on a train, its protagonists, an unnamed man and woman, simultaneously traversing Russia and Russia's metaphysical heritage, amid social chaos. People try to get out, or in. Early on, a face in the crowd is crushed on the tracks. The train cannot be stopped, nor can the lovers, nor the Russian spirit; the human spirit, I should say.

"High's treatment of this love-among-the-ruins motif
echoes the stream-of-consciousness of Marguerite Duras' Hiroshima Mon Amour and the layered poetry of Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient. But his technique is even more fragmented, and in his complex polyphony of voice, high stylistic innovation, and mystical aesthetic, he sometimes echoes that great writer of landscape and loss, Edmond Jabes.

"Indeed, Notebook pushes the envelope--mingling narrative, memoir, epistle, poetry, and mythopoeia. Lush, languid, poignant, funky, elegaic, prayerful, his highly personal, impressionistic style is in a line with experimental belle lettrists Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, and Julio Cortazar; more recently, Carole Maso, say...

"And in making us aware of the miracle that Russia
still exists, John High simultaneously awakens us to our own marvelous impermanent existence and the moments of being that interconnect and move us, on our journey in a new millennium."