Ruth Behar Everything I Kept / Todo lo que guardé Trans. Ruth Behar. Chicago. Swan Isle Press (University of Chicago Press, distr.). 2018. 99 pages. Born in Havana, Cuba, but raised in Florida , Ruth Behar explores the poetics of identity, not only as a Cuban living in exile but as a minority within a minority, with deeply treasured traditions of Sephardic Judaism. Presented in both English and Spanish, Behar’s lyric prose poems possess a deeply layered sensibility, with the deeper strata revealing multiple selves, influences, and, above all, ways to come to grips with loss, mortality, the space in human interaction where intentions are never fully knowable. In “Pollo / Chicken,” Behar reflects upon the fact that certain acts of generosity could have been, in reality, masked and subtle cruelty. In “Cuba,” Behar explores how leaving Cuba as a child, the only place she knew and loved, affected her as an adult: “Llegué a ser esta mujer inmune a las palabras tiernas . . . a tu amor” / “I became this woman immune to tender words . . . to your love.” One might think that Behar simply explores the damaging impact of exile, but her focus is more complex, and her poetic montages show how self-reflection generates awakenings and turning points. In “Volver / Return,” the vision of her now-threadbare Indian dress hanging in her closet is juxtaposed with a memory. Behar’s poem foregrounds the mental process of gaining wisdom. However, in being willing to see things in new ways, and in breaking free from tradition (how breakfast could consist of macaroni and cheese), she also opens herself to bittersweet nostalgia and loss. Behar captures the painful desire for the impossible (e.g., that a person long gone will return) through imagery and the refrain of a popular song by Marta Valdés. In the poetics of Everything I Kept, loss leads to what can never be lost. The kaleidoscopic panoramas of nature and patterns of behavior give rise to memory and hope (“Suddenly from the ocean far away a seagull came”). Ultimately , Behar writes beautifully of rebirth: “two crocuses daring to show their faces before the end of winter.” Susan Smith Nash University of Oklahoma Maxim Amelin The Joyous Science: Selected Poems of Maxim Amelin Trans. Derek Mong & Anne O. Fisher. Buffalo, New York. White Pine Press. 2018. 180 pages. There is visceral excitement upon welcoming a new poet into one’s personal canon— it’s like collecting a little bit of immortal light—and Russian poet Maxim Amelin certainly deserves this. Born in 1990 at the very end of the Soviet Union, he has been active on the contemporary Russian poetry scene, as editor, critic, and translator; his three volumes exclusively of poetry, Cold Odes (1996), Dubia (1999), and The Gorgon ’s Steed (2003), cluster in a seven-year period from which derives the present bilingual selected volume (see WLT, Sept. 2017, 32–33). The whimsical, eponymous title poem, “The Joyous Science” (a nod to Nietzsche’s early volume of the same name), is a sprawling twenty-pager, replete with Victorian -style side notes detailing “The True Story of the Famous Bruce, Composed in Verse / from the Accounts of Several Eyewitnesses .” The English translation largely preserves the original abab stanza rhymes and their whimsy, tracing the adventures World Literature in Review 84 WLT SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2018 ...