Oscillating between existential enormity and the “tiny electronic mess” of the self, Ivanna Baranova’s Continuum telescopes temporal vastness into sharp and shimmering poetic utterance.
Keenly perceptive and sonically incantatory, Continuum follows the porous “I” across slippery thresholds of past, present, and future. Baranova’s poems probe the structures that demand we situate ourselves transactionally as cogs in the productivity machine. When “every rational option” tries and fails, these poems challenge us to embrace irrational options—the stuff of dreams and fantasies—in manifesting radical, kaleidoscopic visions of the future. Continuum enjoins us to will these futures a reality. Lovingly dialogic, the collection is peopled with “after poems,” inviting such queer and feminist figures onto the page as Simone de Beauvoir, Louise Glück, Chariot Wish, and others. Baranova writes with, to, and alongside these thinkers, while also addressing a vast and shifting “you,” calling upon the power of connection and interdependence that makes our survival not only possible but pleasurable, despite the inevitabilities of pain and grief. If language creates us, Continuum’s poetics are a testament to the limitless possibilities of making and remaking the self.
