Dark Elderberry Branch

**2014 Eric Hoffer Award for Poetry – First Runner-Up** **2014 Montaigne Medal Finalist** **2014 da Vinci Eye Finalist**

A reading by Ilya Kaminsky and Jean Valentine

“This ‘homage’ to Tsvetaeva captures moments, lines, and fragments the way a talented artist captures an individual with a few well-placed strokes of charcoal. As artists understand, a faithful rendering is not always the best way to capture an individual, a scene, or an idea. It is not completeness or precision that are most important, but instead, intuition, empathy, and artfulness. And in this sense *Dark Elderberry Branch* succeeds brilliantly.” ⎯Gwarlingo

“. . .a master class in poetics. . . [bringing] layer after layer of meaning, context, and skill to life. . . . Tsvetaeva would approve of this re-vision of her work.” —*The California Journal of Poetics*

“…with tenderness and emotional integrity [Valentine and Kaminsky] created a Tsvetaeva-centric world in gorgeous poems and fragments of prose.” —The Rumpus

“Non-Russian speakers will still never know exactly what it’s like to read Tsvetaeva, but Valentine and Kaminsky have tapped into something that may contain the inklings of Tsvetaeva’s soul.” —*Construction Magazine*

“The magnitude of love, exile, loss, desperation and faith is met with a fortitude most of us will never have to muster; a vulnerability most would never expose.