#botm

At SnaccPop Studios, we’re not just celebrating freedom, heritage, and resilience today—but, also as a proudly Black-owned studio!

And guess what? Our amazing Guest Artist of the Month for the month of May, SilkyNova, is back with a stunning new piece featuring our beloved Black SP characters celebrating with some delicious red velvet cake. 🎨: SilkyNova

February 1, 2025

Books of 2026: SOPHIA PARNOK: The Life and Work of Russia's Sappho by Diana Lewis Burgin.

Absolutely squeaking over the finish line with April's Book of the Month Poetry Quest installment!

Parnok was a Russian poet, journalist, and translator who lived from 1885 to 1933 (which, yeah, overlaps with WWI and the Russian Revolution and also Stalin-era Soviet Union--what a time to be a poet). She was also Jewish and pretty openly a lesbian and chronically ill (Grave's disease), so she seemed like a fascinating person to read up on. Turns out: she's hugely relatable, writerly-speaking, and also hilarious, and pointed and brutal. So, yeah, fascinating!

This one winds up being the least poetry per poetry volume in my list. It's got English translations of a selection of Parnok's work (the only readily available, despite the 1994 copyright date??), but it's actually Mostly Biography, pieced together from letters and poems and other people's accounts. I'm pretty sure I picked Parnok out of a Wikipedia lineup of "female Russian writers" (also how I found Tsvetaeva and remembered about Akhmatova), because I've read some Russian authors, but almost entirely men.

Speaking of Wikipedia: The English language page for Sophia Parnok has 170 citations, and the Vast Majority of those are from Diana Lewis Burgin, so. Excellent Spark Notes version, if you're interested!

Parnok is such a writer mood, which absolutely tickled me--the number of quotes I scribbled in my notebook and flagged "girl, mood" was unreal. Even things like "she had to suffer through a shitty office job to support herself" were hugely heartening: Sure, she probably sunk a lot of time into said office job, but what she's remembered for is her art and her literary criticism and her voice, which I love.

It was also interesting to see snapshots of history and of lesbian culture in Russia in this time period--apparently this volume is one in a Whole Academic Series of such things ("The Cutting Edge: Lesbian Life and Literature"), if that's your speed. I found this one fairly approachable, although I was a little disappointed that so many of the quotations were incorporated into Burgin's prose instead of being Freestanding Poems (I was, after all, here for the poems)(to be clear: this is a me problem, not a NYU Press problem lol).

in the rain