Oscillating between existential enormity and the “tiny electronic mess” of the self, Ivanna Baranova’s Continuum telescopes temporal vastness into sharp and shimmering poetic utterance.

Oscillating between existential enormity and the “tiny electronic mess” of the self, Continuum telescopes temporal vastness into sharp utterance. Keenly perceptive and sonically incantatory, Continuum follows the porous “I” across elastic thresholds of past, present, and future, emphasizing and exalting spontaneous movements in day-to-day consciousness. Baranova probes the structures that demand we situate ourselves transactionally, calling upon the power of connection that makes our survival not only possible but purposeful, despite the inevitabilities of pain and grief. When “every rational option” tries and fails, these poems challenge us to embrace irrational options—the substance of dreams—in manifesting transformational visions of the future that refuse neat resolution. Continuum enjoins us to will these futures a reality. Lovingly dialogic, this collection bears witness to ongoing destruction and renewal, the inexhaustible ordinary. If language creates us, Continuum’s poetics are a testament to the limitless possibilities of making and remaking the self.

Ivanna Baranova's profile page

Ivanna Baranova is a writer, editor, teacher, and artist from the Pacific Northwest living in Los Angeles. She is the author of Confirmation Bias (Metatron Press, 2019) and Creative Communications Coordinator at the Poetry Project.

"All mouthfeel and juicy harmonics, Ivanna Baranova’s Continuum lives on the soft palate. Radically haptic, these poems leave the tongue to ricochet off the teeth like a Nabokovian dream. With rigorous assonance and hymnlike devotion, Baranova breaks language like a geode in order to prove that 'love doesn’t end, just keeps growing like a cut.' Continuum arranges our psychic space into a 'constellatory practice' that allows consciousness to be dispersed beyond corporeal forms. Saturated, restrained, and demanding, these poems pool with surface tension as Continuum gently wrings out our grief and our gods to the brink of knowability. But Baranova knows enough not to control the weather and call it fate, as 'collapse never anticipates its subsequent form.' You want these poems in your pocket, in your throat, in your moments of collapse."

- Rosie Stockton, author of Permanent Volta

"Continuum is a work of crystalline shock-rapture, a devotional volt through grief. Within its thickening, Ivanna Baranova’s nightblooms of language beckon us toward 'a ceremony of unconscious induction,' auguries of devotion of gut. However devastating the years feel, Baranova grounds meaning in language’s 'audial radiance,' its ongoing wick denuding texture in time’s sinuous passage. My whole bodyshook—heart, emblazoned.

- Imogen Xtian Smith, author of Stemmy Things

"Continuum proceeds with the clairvoyant measure of the psychic and the matte force of the believer who speaks to us from the hill of the hard-earned. Its lines are clipped so that their content won’t explode, because Baranova's bodies and spirits, and what lives between them, are under enormous pressures – crushed by time and space, high on sun and mind. In these poems, the hair-shirt of living is threaded with gold or silk. Put another way, the work of the poet makes life more available, less mortifying."

- Benjamin Krusling, author of Glaring