My Hollywood and Other Poems

Book excerpt: "The wit and daring of his rhymes and phrasing remind me of that old master, Donald Justice, who dazzled us with the elegance of his forms. Dralyuk carries this high style into the 21st century, and I, for one, am thrilled to be in the presence of his marvelous verbal art. Pay attention, readers: a new maestro is in our midst."--Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa "These [poems] are the souvenirs of an almost-vanished glamour, an ethnic, gritty, free-wheeling city, little fantasias encased in rhyme and meter."--Jesse Nathan, McSweeney's My Hollywood and Other Poems is a collection of lyric meditations on the experience of émigrés in Los Angeles. In forms ranging from ballades to villanelles to Onegin sonnets, the poems pursue the sublime in a tarnished landscape, seek continuity and mourn its loss in a town where change is the only constant. My Hollywood draws on the poet's own life as a Jewish immigrant from the Soviet Union, honors the vanishing traces of the city's past, and, in crisp and poignant translations, summons the voices of five Russian poets who spent their final years in LA, including the composer Vernon Duke.