My Soviet Union

"My Soviet Union is an intelligent, enigmatic read. Ideal for those who enjoy finely crafted poetry as well as political writing, readers will be missing out if they don't add Dumanis's new book to thier library."—The Potomac

"[My Soviet Union] foregrounds Dumanis's charming self-mockery and offhanded insight, qualities that pervade this vivacious and original book, deservedly the winner of the Juniper Prize for poetry."—Nicholas Birns, Magill Book Reviews

"My Soviet Union is a remarkable album of dark vaudeville and assured verbal performances. Its speakers are a host of desperate comedians at the edge of history, making do and making jokes in the ruins of empire. The spirits of Joseph Cornell, Mayakovsky, and Buster Keaton seem to ventriloquize the earthly, troublesome body of one Michael Dumanis, a haunted citizen born in a country that no longer exists, standing before us in a confluence of phrases that are themselves a sort of nation: crazed, American, beautiful, a giddy torrent of comedy and sorrow."—Mark Doty

"Michael Dumanis's My Soviet Union is a book in which history meets compassion, in which bleak nostalgia meets a confused and beautiful present. Dumanis's poems of 'identity' are also poems of similitude—he is a poet comfortable in parable and allegory, a poet of great lyric gifts and expressive range, a poet who delights with linguistic experimentations and hybrids. My Soviet Union is truly a dazzling launch."—Denise Duhamel

"Michael Dumanis, like cummings, is a bold romantic inventor, an ironist who anticipates abstract states as naturally as a wayward child imagines recess, but his poems also relish the quotidian, and his unspoken sources are the often grim politics of adulthood. Though his poems wear many masks, his central presence is unwavering freshness. Dumanis is a poet we need badly, who brings to every line both a respect for dailiness and a near absolute imaginative fidelity. Read My Soviet Union ; then read it again."—Rodney Jones

"My Soviet Union is indeed a union: of uncommon music and a kind of changeling language, so that we're never sure if we're clutching a wrist or a wrench, gazing at gauze or at Lillian Gish. The effect of this pas de deux is sublime. For sublime poetry, Longinus asserted, leaves more food in the mind than the words convey on first encounter. Dumanis brings together a feast of various small countries of the imagination. He assembles them into a grand union. He dismantles them. He gives us passages to love and passages to love—yes, you'll want to read everything at least two ways. And, more often, more."—Publishers Weekly

"Whistling through the graveyard of atrocities large and small, Michael Dumanis's Juniper Prize-winning first book My Soviet Union leaps deftly among its personae, dictions, and poetic styles, always testing the capacity of its linguistic inventiveness to contend with the facts of capital-H History. The poet's formal dexterity and imaginative scope are not only impressive, but dizzying, even delightful—or strangely delightful."—Boston Review