Continuum
Ivanna Baranova
we can never understand each other
just alive and growing spoken
what dulls is simply
the fruit of relief
Oscillating between existential enormity and the “tiny electronic mess” of the self, Continuum telescopes temporal vastness into sharp utterance. Keenly perceptive and sonically incantatory, Continuum follows the porous “I” across elastic thresholds of past, present, and future. When “every rational option” tries and fails, Baranova challenges us to embrace irrational options. Lovingly dialogic, this collection bears witness to ongoing destruction and renewal, offering transformational visions of the future that refuse neat resolution. Baranova enjoins us to will these futures a reality. If language creates us, Continuum’s poetics are a testament to the limitless possibilities of making and remaking the self.
Praise
“All mouthfeel and juicy harmonics, Ivanna Baranova’s Continuum lives on the soft palate. Radically haptic, these poems leave the tongue to ricochet off the teeth like a Nabokovian dream. With rigorous assonance and hymnlike devotion, Baranova breaks language like a geode in order to prove that ‘love doesn’t end, just keeps growing like a cut.’ Continuum arranges our psychic space into a ‘constellatory practice’ that allows consciousness to be dispersed beyond corporeal forms. Saturated, restrained, and demanding, these poems pool with surface tension as Continuum gently wrings out our grief and our gods to the brink of knowability. But Baranova knows enough not to control the weather and call it fate, as ‘collapse never anticipates its subsequent form.’ You want these poems in your pocket, in your throat, in your moments of collapse.”
— Rosie Stockton, author of Permanent Volta (Nightboat Books)
“Continuum is a work of crystalline shock-rapture, a devotional volt through grief. Within its thickening, Ivanna Baranova’s nightblooms of language beckon us toward ‘a ceremony of unconscious induction,’ auguries of devotion of gut. However devastating the years feel, Baranova grounds meaning in language’s ‘audial radiance,’ its ongoing wick denuding texture in time’s sinuous passage. My whole body shook—heart, emblazoned.”
— imogen xtian smith, author of Stemmy Things (Nightboat Books)
“Continuum proceeds with the clairvoyant measure of the psychic and the matte force of the believer who speaks to us from the hill of the hard-earned. Its lines are clipped so that their content won’t explode, because Baranova’s bodies and spirits, and what lives between them, are under enormous pressures—crushed by time and space, high on sun and mind. In these poems, the hair-shirt of living is threaded with gold or silk. Put another way, the work of the poet makes life more available, less mortifying.”
— Benjamin Krusling, author of Glaring (Wendy’s Subway, Passage Series)
Excerpts
The Quarterless Review – Issue 30 – soluble heart
Press
Los Angeles Review of Books – The Home Depot Parking Lot at Sunset: On Ivanna Baranova’s Continuum
Montreal Review of Books – “Continuum is at times esoteric and at others immersive (…) The recurring ‘digit-sick landscape’ frames the speakers’ one-sided dialogue within a digital ecology that is at once oppressive and open. Baranova’s continuum of desire routinely blurs the boundaries between love, ecology, and the digital – “make me your living bird // all on the mic in vapor cries / tuning radar, cooing dawn” – propelling the often elliptical reading experience toward an illuminating conclusion.”
