The Well-Rounded Nerd's Personal tumbleblog

Compression —that’s the first word that comes to mind when I think of this collection of poems —her first english translation— by Vera Pavlova. Compression. She packs so much emotional powder, so much passion in just a couple of lines. Two lines, that’s all she seems to need to bring her emotions, and yours, to the surface. After reading them, you can no longer take refuge in innocence; you are exposed. 

I broke your heart

Now barefoot I tread

on shards.

She writes with directness, without veils, exposing herself and her loves and her fears and her desires and her pains, hiding nothing. There is a lot of sex, a lot of unresolved childhood anguish, a lot of longing, a lot of questions about love and life, and of course a lot of (to my eyes exaggerated) russian passion. And, ultimately, life seen as a simple thing: 

A tentative bio:

caught fireflies,

read till dawn,

fell in love with weirdos,

cried buckets of tears

for reasons unknown,

birthed two daughters

by seven men

Photo of the author by Aleksandr Dolgin

We spent this weekend in Cambridge… and we fell in love with the place. There are museums, Harvard, MIT, startups, the Media Lab, ideas, music, people from all over the place and from all different classes, noise, life. Intelligence is what you breathe —so different from the city across the river, focused on “prestige” and “aristocracy”, tamed by Miltown. 

And so are thinking about moving there. For a year, for an experience. To live closer to Harvard and MIT and the photography center and the music and the diversity and the T and all the great things that happen in a city so rich and cultural and diverse and with so much energies.

It shouldn’t be too hard for me —in fact, I’d be “closer” to Philadelphia now, and also more in touch with the world of technology. (A different story for Ani). The hardest part would be to leave our house, and my soccer friends.