Friday, December 22, 2006

Reviews for THE NO-NET WORLD

RAVE REVIEWS FOR THE NO-NET WORLD

Poet Larissa Shmailo doesn't really need a CD of her poetry to prove she's the real deal -- Shmailo is an accomplished poet who's been published in many magazines, journals and reviews. ... Thankfully though, Larissa Shmailo has compiled some of her best work in her new poetry CD, The No-Net World. The No-Net World is a solid collection of Shmailo's intensity, heart and wit. Her poetry is careful, considered, yet powerful. You may be fooled at first by her voice, which lilts like a bird. You may mistake her sweet tone as fragile -- she is far from it, yet still retains a vulnerability that allows her to tap directly into the listener with piercing emotion. Her observations of life and love offer no formality -- she tells it like it is, and sometimes it's gritty.

The album opens with four strong poems, including "In Paran", a dramatic tribal piece that feels ancient and familiar. Shmailo's humor is as sharp as her intensity, this is quickly evident in "For Six Months with You":"For Six Months with You / I would live in Kansas / join a carpool / shave my legs" Though the entire collection is, the best moments come near the end of the CD, first when Shmailo treats us to her own translations of pieces by Russian poets Pushkin and Mayakovsky; then in the most riveting and sobering poem of the collection, "How My Family Survived the Camps" in which the poet deftly recounts her family's history and survival during the Holocaust. The No-Net World takes you on one woman's tour of the globe, combining stark reality with lush hope. I recommend that you go along for the ride.

---LITKICKS.COM

Listening to poet and translator Larissa Shmailo’s latest spoken word CD is almost like attending eighteen short plays in the span of forty minutes. Like the best plays, each poem tells a compelling story of human struggle... Like the best plays, her poems also crackle with breathtaking language, which in the true tradition of the tragedies of which she speaks almost sound as if they could be sung (indeed, in some cases they almost are). Shmailo’s expert understanding of the close relationship between poetry and drama, music and language, and the primal human need to just hear a really, really good story make The No-Net World a truly unique contribution to twenty-first century American poetry, and a CD worth listening to frequently and carefully.

---THEPEDESTALMAGAZINE.com


Larissa Shmailo ...really knows how to write, how to read, how to present her poetry. She is masterful in the wonderfully rhythmic "Johnny I Love You Don't Die"...Shmailo's album is thoughtful, entertaining, and bears repeated listens.

---BOOG CITY

“How My Family Survived the Camps,” [IS] the strongest, the most important poem here, and one which clearly is based on personal (or at least familial) experience, and one which carries great emotional power. In it she describes the combination of luck and ingenuity that enabled her family to survive the Holocaust. The key poem on the CD, it gives by far the best realization of her running theme, that how we react to what happens to us is as important as the events themselves."

---POETIX.COM

Thursday, December 21, 2006

How My Family Survived the Camps

Was micht nicht umbringt, macht mich starker:
What does not kill me makes me stronger.
Nietzsche said this about other things
Not this.

How did my family survive the camps?
Were they smarter, stronger than the rest?
Were they lucky?
Did luck exist in Dora-Nordhausen,
Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen?

How did my family survive?
They were young, my mother and father, in 1943
Twenty years old when taken as slaves.
No one knew my father was a soldier, a communist
So he was not shot
Or taken to be gassed.
My grandmother said quickly to the Germans
He is a mechanic; they needed mechanics
My grandmother, Soviet businesswoman
Begged and bribed the Ukrainian kapos
Begged and bribed the Germans, not SS
They took my father, son of a commissar
And shot the other men.

How did my family survive?
They offered no resistance
Did they collaborate?
Is complicity possible without choice?

They marched to Germany, working
Following the German army
Following the front
Digging trenches, carrying metal
These were the good camps, Kalinovka, Peremeshl
There was still food:
My mother recalls eating an entire vat of potatoes
Fouled by kerosene, discarded by the Germans, not SS
The treatment was not cruel, comparatively, not cruel:
In 1944, the Germans
Were as afraid of the Russian front
As the prisoners were of Germany
And of the other camps.
Where they went nonetheless
Where they were sent nonetheless.

How did they survive Erfurt, the selection?
My mother spoke good German
I see her now at the staging camp
Her keen wit dancing around the SS
Like her young Slavic feet
She was young and good-looking
Thin but good-looking
And the SS liked the Ukrainian Frauen.
On the cattle car to Dora
To the chimneys of that camp
My mother rode with her family intact
Thinner but intact
And ready for work.

How did my family survive?
Was it luck?
In Dora-Nordhausen
Where the air smelled of shit and gas
Where the sun rose but never shone
Was there luck?

The boxcar stopped
At the Nordhausen factory
The way out through the crematorium chimney in Dora
Here, my grandmother learned languages
Wstavach, Stoi, Ren, Schwein, Halt.
In Dora, where not to understand an order meant death
My grandmother learned six languages; after six months
My family could work, hide and ask for bread
In all the languages of Europe.
They learned English the same way.

How did my family survive?
When the Americans came, with chocolate and blankets
My father, six foot one
Was one hundred and twenty pounds
And still we were rich, my mother interjects,
Rich compared to the Jews.
A few months longer, though, a few months longer
We would not have been alive.

How did my family survive?
My grandfather, a teacher
Told this story:
When the Americans came and saw the camp
They invited the people to loot the nearby towns
Take anything, the well-fed soldiers said
My grandfather stood and spoke: We are not animals, he said
But we were, my father interrupts, we were.

How did my family survive?
Survive is not the right word.
I'm alive, my father would say, alive
Alive because I did not die; others died.

Keep breathing, he encouraged me in difficult times
Keep breathing.

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