Bio
Anatoly Kudryavitsky lives in Dublin, Ireland, and in Reggio di Calabria, Italy. His poems appear in Oxford Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, The North, The Prague Revue, Plume, BlazeVox, The Honest Ulsterman, Cyphers, Stride, etc. His most recent poetry collections are The Two-Headed Man and the Paper Life (MadHat Press, USA, 2019) and Scultura Involontaria (Multimedia Edizione, Italy, 2020; a bilingual English/Italian edition of his selected poems). His new collection, Sky Sailing, is due from Salmon Poetry in 2022. His latest novel, The Flying Dutchman, has been brought out by Glagoslav Publications, England, in 2018. In 2020, he won an English PEN Translate Award for his anthology of Russian dissident poetry 1960-1980 entitled Accursed Poets (Smokestack Books, 2020). He is the editor of SurVision poetry magazine.
Anatoly Kudryavitsky
Something You Should Know
If you drive a stake through your heartache,
your vanity will die. You won't have to vampire
the whole neighbourhood.
If you mad-gun a thousand managers,
you'll bullet-hole the crisis. The next one
will blowtorch you.
If you roast a risk, you'll cook an "in absentia",
the so-and-so of non-appreciation.
If you sip the essence of sincerity, you'll
ignite a rocket agent.
If you become the beatnik of an audience,
you'll give birth to a wave of limericks.
Wherever you percolate, remember:
in this terrarium, you can only get anointed
by approximation.