Malaya Bronnaya by Marsha Blitzer

“Marsha Blitzer’s fascinating, sensory, ironic and incisive poems about her time in Moscow in the 90’s is a read not to be missed. Her poetry is replete with amazing imagery: plummeting, huge icicles, poisonous mushrooms, assassinations. Its tone is both comic and ironic in just the right places, and this series of poems manages to dramatize her time living in Moscow as utterly compelling.”

–Tina Barr

“Marsha Blitzer writes unsentimental and curious poems about an earlier, hopeful Russia during the 1990s. She was there, as open to its people as to its stands of pine and silver birch. Which Russian author was it who demanded that artists not avert their eyes? This poet sees both the machine guns and the ice cream. Her perfect-pitch poems march in ranks, the passing parade of Russia in transition in contrast to the warlike dead-end Kremlin of today.”

–Wayne Soini, Author of ED and JO

“Sentimentality and easy answers wither when they meet Marsha Blitzer’s exacting, sophisticated lyricism. She apprenticed herself to Russia’s harsh beauty while a practicing lawyer in Moscow in the 1990s–and to the timeless joys of marriage and motherhood–to create a poetic voice all her own. “They say a musical ear,” she writes, “will hear / the cat’s purr of prized / fish eggs rubbing against / each other.” Her craft is exceptional, her ear is attuned, and I am thrilled by the achievements of Malaya Bronnaya, her first chapbook.

—Greg Wrenn, author of Centaur