Ivanna Baranova’s second poetry book with Metatron Press is a collection of longings – longings for a lover, for a deeper connection to nature, and more. Continuum is at times esoteric and at others immersive, the space between stanzas allowing room for the reader to slow down and unpack the riddle. The recurring “digit-sick landscape” frames the speakers’ one-sided dialogue within a digital ecology that is at once oppressive and open.

Continuum
Ivanna Baranova

Metatron Press
$18.00
paper
64pp
9781988355375

do I see yet

forgiveness is memory mountain

desktop image scavenged

not so much exalted    but exactly, grace

 

I was not built for twenties, I knew that going in

 

time signatures fall to rubble, and quick!

enough to thank you

for our lives    my life,

my life

The poems together are an address to a loved one, imagining conversations that center on music and shared time. Baranova’s continuum of desire routinely blurs the boundaries between love, ecology, and the digital – “make me your living bird // all on the mic in vapor cries / tuning radar, cooing dawn” – propelling the often elliptical reading experience toward an illuminating conclusion. Continuum’s final poems concisely summarize the collection, with the speaker increasingly repeating phrases and losing restraint on the ambiguous brief lines that characterize the early poems. Upon completing the reading experience, the book as a whole tells a satisfying story of temporal poetics and the self.mRb