Additional information
by Aigerim Tazhi (Author), J. Kates (Translator)
Paper-thin Skin is the first bilingual collection (in Russian and English) by Aigerim Tazhi, who has broken ground as a Kazakhstani woman poet by gaining widespread international attention. Fish, insects, birds, the sea, the sky, humans seeking connection, and death figure frequently in these succinct poems, as do windows, mirrors, and eyes: these are poems of observation and deep reflection. Tazhi gently insists that we look at words and the world "in the eye," as she seeks to create what translator J. Kates calls a "mystic community of communication."
Author Biography
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.
