Abstract The poet Helen Adam (1909–93) was born and brought up a daughter of the manse in Scotland, a “child prodigy” of the 1920s and writer of commercially successful, cozy fairy poems trading in youth, innocence, and gossamer. By the late 1950s though still writing in a Scottish folk register, she was now producing and performing murderous and sexually explicit ballads in the workshops and salons of the San Francisco Renaissance. Focusing on the poetic personae she adopted through these twin careers, this essay argues for Adam's importance as transatlantic poet of anachronism, as comfortably located in the fin de siècle Kailyard School as among the Beat Generation. Her constancy not only troubles conventional literary historical periodization, but in doing so begins to reveal the underlying anxieties about modernity common to both polite society in interwar Britain and an avant-garde in postwar America.
Abstract This essay discusses work by two post-Soviet Romani artists: Oksana Marafioti's memoir American Gypsy: A Road from Siberia to Hollywood (2012) and lyrics that Eugene Hütz wrote for his band Gogol Bordello, known for its ‘gypsy punk’ style. Both Marafioti and Hütz spent their childhoods in the Soviet Union before migrating to the United States as teenagers. Marafioti's memoir traces her early life touring with her parents’ musical ensemble, her adolescence in California, and her emergence as a performer. Read alongside Hütz's lyrics, her memoir reveals how both artists use music and performance to explore the complexities of post-Soviet migration, and to articulate hybrid Roma identities. Music for them functions as a symbol, practice, and vehicle of defiance—challenging racialization, marginalization, and other forms of exclusion in both Soviet and US contexts.
Abstract This essay applies a disability, decolonial, and multiethnic studies perspective to a reading of Ilya Kaminsky's poetic drama Deaf Republic (2019). The Odesa-born Anglophone poet's deafness is discussed in the context of disability studies and put in dialogue with the racism and homophobia addressed in Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera. Such an intersectional interpretation of Kaminsky's selected works (poems, essays, and interviews) demonstrates his relevance to both post-Soviet Ukraine and contemporary US American studies.
