The Haunting, Half-Lit World Of Yelena Moskovich’s Virtuoso

Reviewed by John Biscello

Virtuoso
by Yelena Moskovich
Two Dollar Radio, 272 pp., $12.74

“But I see my mind’s asleep.
Were it to remain wide awake from this point on, we should quickly arrive at the truth, which may well be all around us now (its angels weeping)!” — Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell

And so, let us start by imagining those angels, weeping. Their tears, tiny silver scalpels. Their wings, mangled. Their faces, featureless and orphaned to pools of light. They are everywhere, traceless repositories for unheard screams and unheld children who grow fitfully into adults (housing mutated unheld children in the attics of their guts, the sacral basements of their anuses). Everywhere, innocents locked in metaphysical orphanages, everywhere, angels slashing at air with turquoise tears.

This is what needs to be imagined, conjured, arrived at. This is how gauzy scrim calls to the curious and brave and dream-blooded to sneak intimate peeks, like the tenderest of spiritual peepshows. Here, I return to Rimbaud, or rather how he was compared to Paul Verlaine in Arthur Rimbaud: Presence of an Engima, by Jean-Luc Steinmetz: “Where Verlaine describes, Rimbaud hallucinates, and creates an epic. It is not the recreation of a décor that matters to him, but the shaping of one from the starting point of a few elements bestowed by reality. Authentic magic, a spellcasting…