Paper-Thin Skin

Aigerim Tazhi (Айгерим Тажи) is one of the best-known contemporary Kazakh poets. She is the author of БОГ-О-СЛОВ (THEO-LOG-IAN, which could also be read as GOD O' WORDS) (Musagetes, Kazakhstan, 2004) and the bilingual poetry book Бумажная кожа/Paper-Thin Skin (Russian-English, Zephyr Press, USA, 2019, translated by J. Kates). Tazhi won the International Literary Steps Prize in Poetry in 2003; in 2011, she was a finalist for the International Debut Prize in Poetry; in 2019, she was included in the prize list of the International Literary Poetry Award and named a finalist of the International Literary Voloshin Contest. Her work has been featured in many prominent literary magazines and anthologies; and her poems have been translated into English, French, Dutch, Polish, German, Armenian, Uzbek and other languages. In 2009 Tazhi created a continuing project of literary installations and performances, Visible Poetry. She lives in Almaty, Kazakhstan.J. Kates is a poet, literary translator and co-director of Zephyr Press. The author of several collections of his own poetry, he is also the translator of more than a dozen books by Russian and French poets, including Tatiana Shcherbina, Mikhail Aizenberg, Mikhail Yeryomin, Aleksey Porvin, Jean-Pierre Rosnay, and Sergey Stratanovsky. He co-translated four books of Latin American poetry, was the translation editor of Contemporary Russian Poetry, and was the editor of In the Grip of Strange Thoughts: Russian Poetry in a New Era. He has been awarded three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, the Cliff Becker Book Prize in Translation, and a Käpylä Translation Prize.

• Translator's Introduction: Aigerim Tazhi's Temple of Words1Walking like a camelWhere is it, where is what moves forward?The trees know it is early to wake up.In the depth of a mirror mottled with stains The wind makes a measured noise.There is a certain rhythm in anxiety.Summer, organize a soundless holiday with a forest at night.Hidden behind a gray facade,Ivy. I gathered it on the river bank.In the house a windowRain ran over a keyboard of leaves.I strain to listen for an imagined world: Hands reach out. You hide yourself deep down.A tree, keeping in balance,Oh, why, from where to whereA purple window. A yellow one.After I caught a conversation in the park,When the narrator nods off on a mountain of books,A runner with a flashlight in his headWindows opening to the eastIn open maps the future . . . and somewhere everyday life turned into a miracleI want to float downstream 2A warm center floats up from the skin.Probably a god is like a dying personPeople carry dirt under their nails,Don’t take one last breath — nothing to breathe here. Earth, dying on the eve of winter, Someone among the branches It seems the more room Over the heads of shriveled applesMusic in the heart gnawing and gnawing.You are standing on the edge of a cloud,The sea has enormous lungsIt can take time to choose a beautiful crabUnderneath, in a German-chocolate boxHeavier than ageWrap up warm — A morning crossroads. Tea freezes in a little cup.On the overhang of the entranceThe natives hide a yellow cobra in baskets of bananas,Tomorrow twenty above Where is the tail of the fishA violet sucks up from a saucer yesterday's sea filtered through the earth. Somebody died.Sleepless in Tibet just like those here 3The aircraft of a dragonfly over the river.The old tree has young leaves.Slowly revealing itselfHead on shoulders. A shroud on the head. The sky is a closed window.To pour out a little from an overflowing heart On the road people seem eternalLike a face in a clinic an angel in whiteA step away from the epicenter. An unlit courtyard.The morning is pecked by birdsWind in the room. rainTrying other people's heads A grim game on the rim.In a sandbox under the playground mushroom When the memory is not the same and hands are not the sameFrom resurrection to sundayA flock of crows from the shores of the horizonThis city is flooded in a radiant glowFirst a flood and finally a fly-boyThe house-ark sheets swelled like sailsGodPushed away from an old shipWhen the body dies, eagles and fish dine well, First at a call a large lion'sNotesBiographical Notes

”For a debut poetry collection, Aigerim Tazhi’s Paper-Thin Skin is a work of stunning originality.“ — Elmira Elvazova, Massachusetts Review “ This is a beautifully translated volume that neither exoticizes nor renders out the joy of reading poetry grounded in another place and language.” — Alison Mandaville, World Literature Today“…[Tazhi's] poetry is enjoyable for the pure inventiveness of her images and observations. The collection is riddled with vivid, often intriguing images and witty one liners.” — Belinda Cooke, Poetry Salzburg Review"Nevertheless, Central Asian literature in English translation remains rare and since Tazhi’s current home of Almaty is equidistant between the capitals of Russia and China, a leading Kazakh poet, for such Tazhi evidently is, deserves to be read as much to her East as to her West. — Peter Gordon, Asian Review of Books"A beautiful bilingual book, produced with care and attention to white space around the poems, Paper-Thin Skin speaks to layers of loss–from personal and private to the loss of the country (I read these poems in the post-Soviet context) to climate change and the loss of habitats." — Olga Zilberbourg, Punctured Lines