Oksana Zabuzhko poem from novel

Tonight, terror will probably come.

Hot shivers—of lovemaking or vomiting.

Foreboding debauched coupling

Or death's cry--shake the ailing body.

Rupture, rupture--all ligaments, nerves, veins:

My defenselessness is now so total,

Like an overt call to evil: Come!

I've already seen myself as a building

In which an orange rectangle burns

in the night, a bare window,

With planks across the chest

And bottom of the abdomen, like for an X-ray,

And the rock, the one to shatter the pane

Already lies there, waiting for the hand.

(p.92-3 from FIUS)

I see the spaceship from Star Trek: Discovery. Cleveland Book's spaceship disassembles, and reforms to fit through things as it flies. I think that is how we must all be, shattering and reassembling in impossible ways.

The novel with the word "sex" in it is Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex, but it's mostly about disappointments sexually, sexual pain, and frustrating and failed relationships of a poet with a painter, as it relates to Ukrainian identity.

Quote starting p. 105: "is despair not too great a luxury for Ukrainians, who after all, were granted for the first time this century a realistic chance of leading a full life?"

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Manet and Degas

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Motley Kamuka

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