Putinoika - by Giannina Braschi (Paperback)
About this item
Highlights
- PUTINOIKA is a multi-genre epic about frenzy and plague in the era of Putin and Trump.
- Author(s): Giannina Braschi
- 294 Pages
- Poetry, American
Description
About the Book
PUTINOIKA is a multi-genre epic about frenzy and plague in the era of Putin and Trump.
Book Synopsis
PUTINOIKA is a multi-genre epic about frenzy and plague in the era of Putin and Trump. Inspired by the ancient Greek tragedies, PUTINOIKA unfolds in three-parts: Palinode, Bacchae, and Putinoika. In a world flooding with collusion, delusion, and pollution, hope not only stands its ground in PUTINOIKA, but it also elevates us to higher realms with exhilarating new literary forms, poetic expressions, and a renewed faith in creativity. PUTINOIKA insists that poets, philosophers, and lovers have the capacity to create on a scale greater than society's capacity to destroy. If Waiting for Godot is a threnody of hope in the atomic age, PUTINOIKA is the "Invictus" we didn't know we were waiting for after the global pandemic.
Review Quotes
Praise for Putinoika
"In Giannina Braschi's churning imagination, in her exuberant, upwelling, hilarious and mortifying performances of wonderment, howl, synchronic time, ethical insistence, and linguistic swirl, it's not unusual to find words such as 'generosity' and 'spirit' leading, in the same sentence, to 'welfare, ' 'radiation, ' and 'tax deductions.' If, as in Ezra Pound's translation of Aristotle, the 'swift perception of relations' is truly the 'hallmark of genius, ' it's in the brightly lit halls of Braschi's books where poetry is tested and stamped with such a mark. Like her character, Frenzy, she's a provocateur who believes in and pledges her fidelity only to 'everything that exists.'"
-Forrest Gander, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and author of Mojave Ghost
"This powerful, funny, profound, wise, crazed book is a wild ride. It is a bomb (a poem?, a novel?, a play?, fiction? essay?, comedy?, drama? all of the above?). It is a meditation on poetry, art, the pandemia, politics, Trump, his wall, the Putinas, the author, Puerto Rico, Oedipus, and Baudelaire. I laughed to tears here and there while the book displays one of the cruelest portraits of our times. Bravo, Giannina!"
-Carmen Boullosa, award-winning poet, novelist, and playwright
"Braschi's Putinoika, like Hegel's Phenomenology, presents readers with a gallery of voices through which the collective zeitgeist-dominated by the crumbling hegemony of the United States-may come to recollect the chaotic shapes of its barely figurable past. But unlike the Hegelian spirit, the spirits that traverse Braschi's work urge us to 'confront the terror that happens in the void where nothing works, ' encouraging us to envision a future beyond the eternal return of the same. Readers familiar with her oeuvre will find Putinoika quintessential Braschi: witty, irreverent, and astonishingly lucid!"
-Ronald Mendoza-de Jesús, Associate Professor, Comparative Literature, Emory University
"Braschi's most audacious and electrifying creation yet! This thrilling ride spans from classical Greece to front page news, where the supernatural dances with the mundane, and the surreal becomes everyday reality. This isn't just a read; it's an experience-a whirlwind of recent history where anything can happen and often does. Eccentric, hilarious, and profound, Putinoika is the rara avis of modern literature-a true original that shatters conventions and leaves an indelible mark on your soul. As Tony Kushner gives us Angels in America marking the AIDS epidemic and Perestroika, Braschi gives us Putinas in America amidst the global pandemic with Putinoika. Her fearless storytelling sweeps you off your feet."
-Nuria Morgado, Director, North American Academy of the Spanish Language and Correspondent, Royal Spanish Academy
"With Putinoika, Braschi makes a quantum leap which takes the novel from an unprecedented level of experimentation and into a new dimension. A polyphony of voices fizz, crackle, and cackle in a tour de force of philosophical poetry and poetical philosophy, offering a biting and hilarious denunciation of Trump's America."
-Madelena Gonzalez, Chair, Anglophone Literature, University of Avignon