Our guide is Vladimir Nabokov’s ghost, who speaks only in anagrams of his own name (MAD VIM. RIVAL BOOK!). Anagrams of Pale Fire, a poem of 999 lines by the American poet John Shade, also abound.

Dark Ice is a long poem with detailed notes and parodies of notes, in which Russian and American history begin to melt, run together, and recrystalize into strange new forms. The poem appeared in print in Bomb; the poem plus the notes appeared online on the NABOKV-L Listserv, and on the International Vladimir Nabokov Society’s Zembla website. According to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which gave me a prize, the poem presents ”a marbled-paper dreamland where cultural antitheses are swirled together.”

You can read it here: