Though Aleksandr Skidan has been publishing for years in Russia, "Red Shifting" is his first collection of poetry to be translated into English. Skidan has become fluent in American culture, and has carefully splayed it out in his poems. He deals with the subjects of censorship, displacement, and language with an unsettling ease, digs into himself and into his reader with abandon and uncovers things most of us would rather keep buried. Skidan's vocabulary of allusions requires many visits before it yields to the reader; his pieces alternate between a stark clarity and a calm aloofness that have few equals in their level of challenge. (Red Shifting, Ugly Duckling Press).- Blythe Boyer
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