On Sunday, May 7, at 4:00pm, Poet Judith Rypma will be at Russian Samovar to read from her collection, “Worshipping at Lenin’s Mausoleum.” The book traces the speaker’s impressions through the Cold War, the Brezhnev era, glasnost, perestroika, and the development of the Russian Federation. Rypma will be available after the reading to sign books and for a Q&A. You can find further information about her work, books, and career at www.rypmabooks.com
Poet Judith Rypma began her love affair with Russia at an early age, and has written several collections of poetry and two novels echoing her experiences.
Renowned Poet Katie Manning points out that the poems “guide readers through five decades of interactions with Russia, from a U.S. child’s experience of air raid drills in 1962 to an adult’s experience of present-day St. Petersburg on her 30th visit to Russia. These poems not only engage with Lenin, Stalin, and Catherine the Great, but also Raggedy Ann, Oz’s Dorothy, and Baba Yaga. This short collection is at once historical and immediate, political and spiritual, familiar and surprising.”
Artist and author Raymond Materson describes the poems as “a love story with the culture of the world’s most enigmatic country; Rypma recounts a history of splendor, beauty and great ostentation juxtaposed with fear, poverty and State as well as religious fervor. It is a chronicle of hope, despair and majesty that resounds like the trod of hoof steps across the cobblestones of Red Square. To read her superlative writings is to know the soul of a country and a people that have shifted and reshifted.”
This event is free.