Please join us to celebrate the launch of The Feeling Sonnets by Eugene Ostashevsky. Hosting the reading will be Rachael Allen, author and poetry editor at Granta. The event will feature readings and discussion, and audience members will have the opportunity to ask their own questions. We will show the text during readings so that you can read along.

The Feeling Sonnets are written in an English that is translingual not only because it engages other languages but also because it reflects upon itself in uncertainty as if it were the work of a language learner. Words, idioms, sentences, poetic conventions are made strange, dislocated, recontextualised to convey some of the linguistic effects of the migration experience, the experience of non-nativeness. The book includes four cycles of fourteen unrhymed, unmetered, logically Petrarchan sonnets. The first cycle asks about the relationship between interpretation and emotion: whether ‘we feel the feelings that we call ours’. The second, mainly composed of ‘daughter sonnets’, describes bringing up children in a foreign language. The third, ‘Die Schreibblockade’, German for writer’s block, talks about foreign-language processing of inherited historical trauma. The fourth cycle is about translation. A libretto commissioned by Italian composer Lucia Ronchetti follows, about Ravel’s interaction with Paul Wittgenstein over the Piano Concerto for the Left Hand.

Registration for this online event will cost £2, later redeemable against the cost of the book. All attendees will receive the discount code and how to purchase the book during and after event.