In her homeland of Russia, Polina Barskova is considered a prodigy, one of the most accomplished and daring of the younger poets. Born in 1976 in Leningrad (now called St. Petersburg, as before) she began publishing poems in journals at age nine and released the first of her eight collections as a teenager. She came to the United States at the age of twenty to pursue a Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, having already earned a graduate degree in classical literature at the state university in St. Petersburg. Barskova now lives in Massachusetts with her family and teaches at Hampshire College. Her two books of poetry in translation were published recently: This Lamentable City (trans. by Ilya Kaminsky, Tupelo Press, 2010) and Zoo in Winter (Trans. by David Stromberg, Boris Draliuk, Melville House, 2011). Besides English, Barskova's poetry was translated into French, Italian, Danish.