"our monuments to southern california." she calls them. by olga mikolaivna

Part memoir, part poetic research, part meditation on infrastructure, olga mikolaivna’s “our monuments to southern california.” she calls them. pulls from the theory and photography of Catherine Opie’s Freeways series and transposes the fragmented landscape of her own memory upon our austere monuments of American expansion. Concrete and steel adumbrate and inundate the text as mikolaivna’s syntax achieves a forced perspective of the everyday. The concepts of entrance and exile are volleyed throughout the poet’s indictment of these hostile infrastructures which strangle the regional ecology in what mikolaivna calls a “histrionics of americanness.” There is such thing as a totalitarian use of industrial materials (Mussolini’s brutalism comes to mind), and mikolaivna’s literacy of Opie’s work invites us to interrogate the discouraging totalitarianism of our daily commute (its own banality of evil). The closer the viewer gets to these perverse forms, the more nauseated as we death spiral this “type of sickening carousel.”

olga mikolaivna was born in Kyiv and works in the (intersectional/textual) liminal space of photography, word, translation, and installation. Her debut chapbook cities as fathers is out with Tilted House. Her translation of Stanislav Belsky's first full length collection in English, There Won't be a Culmination, is out with Dialogos / Lavender Ink. She lives in Philadelphia and teaches at Temple University.