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FOUR WAY REVIEW

TWO POEMS by Ekaterina Derysheva, translated by Ryan Hardy, Asher Maria, Kevin M.F. Platt, and Timmy Straw

by Ekaterina Derysheva / Monday, 14 April 2025 / Published in Issue 32

*

a wave of uneasiness twists
the room’s cube unwinds in a chain of noise

walls’ origami contracts into hummocks like hedgehogs

contradictions of altitude

the outcrop presses man
into the clouds of trees

 

Translated by Ryan Hardy, Kevin M. F. Platt, Timmy Straw

 

protocol peonies

*

dew’s perspective

the lens observes a retinal path
from the birch leaf’s center
to the edge and back

the image is absorbed
exfoliating the impression
with a blink

<protocol peonies>

 

Translated by Asher Maria and Kevin M. F. Platt

 

Ryan Hardy is a translator, educator, and Master’s candidate at University College London’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies. He has held various writing and editing positions for the School of Russian and Asian Studies, Pomona College Vestnik, and DoubleSpeak Magazine.

 

 

Asher Maria is a Ph.D. student in Comparative Literature & Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania. Their work in translation focuses on Lithuanian, Russian, and Portuguese writing. They were a 2024-25 Emerging Translation Mentorship winner with the UK’s National Centre for Writing.

 

 

Kevin M. F. Platt is a professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of. His translations of Russophone and Latvian poetry have appeared in Asymptote, World Literature Today, Jacket2, and other journals, as well as in a number of books. He is founder and organizer of the Your Language My Ear translation symposium.

 

 

Timmy Straw is a poet, musician, and translator from Oregon. A graduate from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, their first poetry collection The Thomas Salto was published by Fonograf Editions in 2023, and their work has appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review, Annulet, and Yale Review. 

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Woman in black leather jacket (Ekaterina Derysheva) looks at the camera.

About Ekaterina Derysheva

Ekaterina Derysheva is a displaced poet from Kharkiv, Ukraine. Since January 2024, Derysheva has been living in Philadelphia, where she is currently an Artist Protection Fund Fellow, poet-in-residence, and at-risk scholar, hosted by the Department of Russian and East European Studies and the Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania. Derysheva is concurrently the 2024-2025 Writer-in-Residence at Public Trust. Derysheva’s poems have been published in journals such as Asymptote, Circulo de Poesia, Plume, Zerkalo, Tlen Literacki, Literaturportal Bayern, Wizie, Volga, and others. She is the author of the books Точка отсчета (Starting Point, 2018) and инсталляции не будет (There Will Be No Installation, 2023), and the co-author of the book Insulua Timpului (Earth Time, 2020). Her work is also featured in the anthology In the Hour of War: Poetry from Ukraine, edited by Ilya Kaminsky and Carolyn Forché (Arrowsmith Press, 2023).

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