With What Silence - by Boris Ryzhy (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Since his death in 2001, Boris Ryzhi's reputation in Russia as the "Poet of Perestroika" has continued to grow, drawing readers of all ages to his harrowing lyrics from the 1990s. He wrote some 1,300 poems, combining the sensibilities of the street toughs he grew up around and a writer who finds beauty in the unlikeliest places. His poems are known for their clarity, musicality, emotional intensity, and formal precision, but few of them are familiar to Anglophone readers. For this debut collection in English, translator Olga Mexina selected poems that both represent his strongest work and embody his era. Ryzhi wrote often about love, goodbyes, street musicians, and wintry city scenes, even as his thoughts about death, sadness, and grief pervade the collection. As he wrote in one poem, "I was at odds with this life's grammar." He died by suicide at the age of 26.

About the Author

Boris Ryzhy was born in 1974 and began writing poetry at the age of 14, while also becoming a youth boxing champion. He later studied geophysics and geo-ecology in university and published 18 works on the earth's crust and seismic activity in the Ural Mountains and Russia. He got married in his teens and he and his wife had one son, born in 1993. Ryzhy wrote more than 1300 poems and had achieved considerable fame as a poet both in Russia and abroad when he died by suicide in 2001 at the age of 26.

Olga Mexina is a writer and translator born in what is now St. Petersburg, Russia. A finalist in Narrative's 16^th Annual Poetry Contest, 2024 UK National Poetry Competition, The Bridport Prize, and 2025 ALTA Travel Fellowship, she is currently a PhD candidate at Florida State University and Interviews Editor for Southeast Review. Mexina's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Narrative, Boulevard, and The Red Wheelbarrow. Her translations have appeared in Resistance and Opposition Arts Review, Angime, and elsewhere.