Galina Rymbu’s poems employ history as a discursive tool to understand the present—stories of revolution, movement in time and space, life, and livelihood emerge. Rymbu seeks a radical feminist and leftist poetics that does not condescend to the oppressed, but rather embraces the complexity of every emotion and political position, and of language itself. She opens her poetry to the violence of propaganda, biopolitical manipulation, ideological pressures, as well as the violence of personal intimacy. Life in Space is Rymbu’s first full-length collection in English translation and includes poems selected from her three books as well as more recent work.

Life in Space is translated by Joan Brooks, and includes additional material translated by Helena Kernan, Charles Bernstein and Kevin M.F. Platt, and Anastasiya Osipova (with Marijeta Bozovic, Catherine Ciepiela, Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, Pavel Khazanov, Mila Nazyrova, Eugene Ostashevsky, Val Vinokur, and Michael Wachtel), and a preface by Eugene Ostashevsky.

This book is a co-production with Ugly Duckling Presse (Eastern European Poets Series #46).

Galina Rymbu was born in 1990 in the city of Omsk (Siberia, Russia) and lives in Lviv, Ukraine. She edits F-Pis’mo, an online magazine for feminist literature and theory, as well as Gryoza, a website for contemporary poetry. She is the co-founder and co-curator of the Arkadii Dragomoshchenko Prize for emerging Russian-language poets. She has published three books of poems in Russia: Moving Space of the Revolution (Argo-Risk), Time of the Earth (kntxt), and Life in Space (NLO). Her essays on cinema, literature, and sexuality have appeared on Séance, Colta, Your Art, and other journals. English translations of her work have appeared in The White Review, Arc Poetry, Berlin Quarterly, Music & Literature, n+1, Asymptote, Powder Keg, and Cosmonauts Avenue, as well as in the chapbook White Bread (After Hours Ltd). Her poetry has been translated into thirteen languages and stand-alone collections of her work have been published in Latvian, Dutch, Swedish, and Romanian.

“Galina Rymbu brings the startling energy and innovative candor of a new generation to the revered Russian poetic tradition of cultural critique and social resistance. In a voice entirely her own but resonant with echoes of the art’s heroic figures from both the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, she explodes the nostrums and slogans that flood our lives. Fire is her element, and by its unforgiving light she probes the ashes of revolution, the ruined remnants of ‘68, the desert of theory, ‘the corpse of politics,’ as well as the often hallucinatory complexity and contradictions of the quotidian. And where in all of this, her work asks, is the place of personhood and desire? The poems are relentlessly exploratory, challenging and engaging.”
—Michael Palmer

“Galina Rymbu's poetic core is rock-hard. The untranslatable knot of post-Soviet violence and inequality—political, sexual, and economic—is loosened by her voice of supersensual empathy and restless analysis. Daring and surprising in every poem, Life in Space is the arrival of a new major poet.” 
—Valzhyna Mort

“Unflinchingly visceral, Rymbu’s writing is a guide through a personal history of collective struggle where ‘the body is a travelling puppet show of criticism, fury, horror.’ Rendered in break-neck verse, Life in Space offers the raw, resistant intelligence of a mind bearing witness to the social conditions of its formation, and not without what I can’t help but read as a wink of dark humor. If ever you were looking for a work that reads like deep background on a Pussy Riot song, this is the book for you. The time is now, Rymbu suggests, to ‘hide a blade or a shiv in your mac book case / and move with clenched teeth through the dark fascist ranks.’”
—Liz Howard