Mikhail Eisenberg "Don't Touch Us: Poems" Moscow: New Publishing House, 2024

Mikhail Eisenberg is a crucial figure in contemporary poetry. His poems, seemingly ordinary observations and seemingly devoid of effect, capture recognizable fragments of the surrounding world, but by breaking them into mosaic pieces, they present the reader with a unique picture of the present. The closer you look, the more questions arise. One of the hallmarks of Eisenberg's work is not to answer them. "To exist is the only task of poetry," he writes in one essay, as if emphasizing that answers are far from the most important. "Don't Touch Us" is a collection that asks perhaps the most fundamental questions of our time. The book includes works written in 2022-2023, and in them, the poet places dots on the map of our time. Most of them, unfortunately, are painful.
This world, growing wild before our eyes, We guarded our meekness and our anger. Weighed on home scales, what remains and what we failed to do.

