UIS professor publishes new book of poetry

Rosina Neginsky, associate professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Illinois Springfield, has published a new book of poetry, In the Garden of Luxembourg, which is available in French, English and Russian.

In this collection of poems, published by Harmattan of Paris, Neginsky reveals concepts and images that shimmer and captivate us. In her poetic universe, love and death coexist; fairy tales play an important role: grey wolves, mermaids and tsarinas who rule over islands appear in her poems. The book includes ekphrastic poems inspired by pictorial works and literary poems inspired by literary images, which are enriched by the presence of free associations, legends, and the intense emotions of the interior life of the poems' lyrical hero. Several make a reference to doubles, often there is no border between silence and the uttered speech, between self and non-self.

The editorial presentation of poems allows the reader to see the correspondence between various linguistic versions. In Neginsky's poetry, parallelism, whenever it is respected, does not come only from a faithful translation process but it is often born from her multilingualism, which predates the birth of her poems.

Neginsky was born in St. Petersburg, Russia and studied in Paris and the United States. She is the author of several books of poetry, including Juggler (New Orleans, University Press of the South, 2009), and books on art and literature, the most recent of which is Salome: The Image of a Woman Who Never Was (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2013).

In the Garden of Luxembourg is available for purchase on the publisher’s website. For more information, contact Rosina Neginsky at 217/206-7431 or rnegi1@uis.edu.