Volume 78, 2026
DOI: 10.18422/78-2722
© Göttingen University Press

Falling Sonnet XIV.

Eugene Ostashevsky

There was a fa. It was mine.

I was a mine r.

Do mine, I ate.

I mined it. Owned it.

Land, sand. Mine.

Land mine. Fa mine.

Dine. Bread line.

Fire line. Fire, live. Fire, fair.

Fa, fair. Do, faire.

Faire bonne mine.

Fa mine. Fa, fake.

Deter mine. That was a minor.

Your sand. My land.

From. To.

About the author

Eugene Ostashevsky is a poet and translator whose writing is described as “translingual” because of its focus on linguistic multiplicity and interference. His latest poetry collection, The Feeling Sonnets (Carcanet / NYRB Poets, 2022), examines the effects of speaking a non-native language on emotions, parenting, and identity. An earlier book, The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi (NYRB Poets, 2017), discusses communication difficulties between pirates and parrots. Translated into German by Uljana Wolf and Monika Rinck as Der Pirat, der von Pi den Wert nicht kennt (KookBooks, 2017), it won the 2019 Preis der Stadt Münster für Internationale Poesie. He first moved to Berlin as a fellow at the 2013 DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm.

This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.