Wound
A Novel
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Finalist for the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction
For fans of Maggie Nelson and Eileen Myles, the lyrical and deeply moving story of a young queer woman’s journey across Russia to inter her mother’s ashes and to understand her sexuality, femininity, and grief
From one of Russia’s most exciting new voices, Wound follows a young lesbian poet on a journey from Moscow to her hometown in Siberia, where she has promised to bury her mother’s ashes. Woven throughout this fascinating travel narrative are harrowing and at times sublime memories of her childhood and her sexual and artistic awakening. As she carefully documents her grief and interrogates her past, the narrator of Oksana Vasyakina’s autobiographical novel meditates on queerness, death, and love and finds new words for understanding her relationship with her mother, her country, her sexuality, and her identity as an artist.
A sensual, whip-smart account of the complicated dynamics of queer life in present-day Siberia and Moscow, Wound is also in conversation with feminist thinkers and artists, including Susan Sontag, Louise Bourgeois, and Monique Wittig, locating Vasyakina’s work in a rich and exciting international literary tradition.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Poet Vasyakina explores grief and sexuality in her stirring English-language debut about a 30-year-old lesbian poet named Oksana Vasyakina who makes a lengthy and circuitous trip to bury her mother in late 2010s Russia. After her mother, Angella, loses a yearslong battle with cancer, Oksana travels from her home in Moscow to Volzhsky, where her mother is cremated. She then returns to Moscow with Angella's ashes and contends with a dead-end gallery job and a loveless relationship. Two months pass before her scheduled departure to Siberia, where she was raised and where she plans to bury Angella's ashes. Over this time, Oksana recounts with unflinching clarity her fear of her mother's decaying breath in the weeks before she died, the emptiness in Angella's indifferent gaze while she was sick, and the frustration of having to wait around for someone to die—and contemplates how Angella's emotional neglect over the course of her life impacted her ability to experience carnal pleasure, an effect that ended after her mother's death. The narrative is distinguished by its dry wit and philosophical import, which Alter, a PW contributor, renders in razor-sharp prose (as Oksana feels the urn digging into her back while carrying it in a backpack, she embraces the pain and considers how she's embodying a cliché: "I was on an important ritual journey, which is always marked by suffering"). Vasyakina stuns with this bold and emotionally raw chronicle.