Michael Dumanis

Michael Dumanis was born in the former Soviet Union and lived there until his parents were granted political asylum in the United States. He holds a BA from Johns Hopkins University, an MFA in Poetry from the University of Iowa, and a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Houston. Previously an assistant professor of English at Nebraska Wesleyan University, he is co-editor of the anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century. He is now on the English faculty at Cleveland State University, and is the director of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center. My Soviet Union, his first book of poems, won the Juniper Prize in Poetry for 2006 and was published by the University of Massachusetts Press.

My Soviet Union:
The speaker of the simultaneously funny and devastating poems in this remarkable first collection comes from a country that, like the Soviet Union, no longer exists, a place he treats with a mixture of nostalgia, disdain, and bewilderment as he strives to achieve a sense of order in his current disordered environment, a post-apocalyptic landscape with striking similarities to our own. He takes the reader through haunting and disjunctive childhood memories, on visits to Azerbaijan and West Des Moines, through the ravages of physical and spiritual illness, into and out of wars and ill-fated romantic escapades, as he carefully pieces together a complex narrative of self. This is a book of location and dis-location, intent and inaction, struggle and failure, restraint and mania, love and anger, savagery and healing, grief and merriment, elegy and ode.

My father was a man who lived and died.
He would commute from Nyack to New York.

The woolen business had its ups and downs.
How unrestrained you’ve become, Cage and Coffin.

There is an order to each spectacle.
You are the obligation, Wind, to sunder

this relic of. Am reliquary for
the off-white light of January morning.

Have seen you, Fairies, in your apricot
and chestnut negligees invade the mirror,

tiptoe on marbles, vanish from the scene.
Am reliquary for what World has seen.

I’m the ballet of wingspan, the cracked mirror.
Canary’s coffin. Sunshine breaking through.

(from “Joseph Cornell, with Box”)

“Michael Dumanis’s My Soviet Union is a book in which history meets compassion, in which bleak nostalgia meets a confused and beautiful present. Dumanis’s poems of ‘identity’ are also poems of similitude—he is a poet comfortable in parable and allegory, a poet of great lyric gifts and expressive range, a poet who delights with linguistic experimentations and hybrids. My Soviet Union is truly a dazzling launch.”

— Denise Duhamel

“Michael Dumanis, like cummings, is a bold romantic inventor, an ironist who anticipates abstract states as naturally as a wayward child imagines recess, but his poems also relish the quotidian, and his unspoken sources are the often grim politics of adulthood. Though his poems wear many masks, his central presence is unwavering freshness. Dumanis is a poet we need badly, who brings to every line both a respect for

— Rodney Jones