Worshipping at Lenin's Mausoleum

Two decades after racing in terror during an elementary school air raid drill to escape the "dreaded Commies," a child finds herself battling the restrictions of "Soviet-Style Touring." In poems that provide a lyrical witness to a Russia in flux, from glasnost to the embattled 1990s to 21st-century pride, poet Judith Rypma offers touching and often humorous observations, portraying a deep love for a country Churchill once called "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma." Whether exploring Stalin's bunker, the logistics of Lenin's preserved corpse, or the witch Baba Yaga, the poems provide delightful and keen glimpses into a place often seen as the Big Bad Wolf on the world stage. Like nested dolls you are invited to open, the nation and these poems slowly reveal themselves the way "colored glass and beads / rearrange themselves / with each twist / of the kaleidoscope's wheel."