Creating a Record of Violence and Love: A Review of Lida Yusupova's The Scar We Know (2021, Cicada Press)

Lida Yusupova’s poems are a record - often times a record of violence. One of Yusupova’s collections represents her innovative documentary poetry, which includes snippets from the news and court case verdicts, giving a voice to those who cannot speak. The collection addresses propaganda against gay, lesbian, and transgender people. “May your name resound loudly,” Yusupova writes about a gay man who was killed in a hate crime in Russia as she repeats his name: Vitaly Igorevich. It resonates with names repeated during protests. And so a record is created in hope that history doesn’t repeat itself. The Scar We Know contains poems from three of Yusupova’s collections. They are Ritual C-4, Dead Dad, Verdicts, as well as the poem “The Center for Gender Problems.” 

I first become acquainted with Yusupova’s poetry through Oksana Vasyakina’s poem, which, in some way, offered instruction on how to read Yusupova. I encountered it in the F Letter anthology (isolarii, 2020) “These People Didn’t Know My Father” which comes into dialogue with Yusupova’s Dead Dad, by talking about her own “dead dad.” It is written from the point of view of a bookstore clerk who watches customers come in contact with Yusupova’s collection. An excerpt from Vasyakina’s poem reveals how customers are made uncomfortable by Yusupova’s collection and sets us up for how uncomfortable her poems might make us feel: 

he picked up Lida’s book again
and handed it to the woman
I looked at her

…

a beautiful beautiful beautiful woman
in the very heart of the capital
inside a trendy contemporary theater
giggling over the tiny frightening book in her hands 


Vasyakina wrote the introduction to The Scar We Know. In it, she talks about the tenderness with which Yusupova treats her characters. Even though their situations may make us uncomfortable, they are people in our communities that we can relate to. We are uncomfortable when they are put in violent situations; we sympathize and care about them.

In the reality that Yusupova is describing, the geography is vast. She likes the use of foreign names in her poems as in the collection Ritual C-4. For example, in the first poem in the collection “Saxifrage,” she includes text in Inuktitut, a native Canadian language. It helps to depict the environment. This poem is a record of violence against women that is present in the image of vicious dogs and in the men who watch. The story comes from An Illustrated History of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (published in 1973). It is part of history that Yusupova chooses to bring into the present. 

The poem “The Scar We’ve Known About from the Very Beginning” presents the idea that we are aware of violence even before it happens and makes us wonder if this makes violence preventable, “I thought why why didn’t Dima tell me / I would have saved him.” She speaks of Dima, a man who committed suicide after an attempt in which he tried to cut his own head off, which left a scar. The scar is then repeated on the neck of a black man in the New York subway. This reveals how histories repeat themselves in different forms.

The poems from the collection Dead Dad, the text with which Vasyakina comes into dialogue, seem to expand throughout the book as the patriarchy is shattered by being made to be diminutive in the three-foot-long piece by sculptor Ron Mueuk titled “Dead Dad.” There are three sections in the poem “Dead Dad.” In one, Yusupova uses her voice to talk about her dad. In another, she focuses on Mueuk’s piece “Dead Dad.” In another Kenny Bennett, who she says she loves very much, writes about his dad. Kenny is close with his dad who taught him “how to love women.” The placement of this text seems to imply that Yusupova never had this closeness with her dad. She might have been showing what is possible in a father-daughter relationship.

Dad’s eyes “your transparent blue eyes/looking into the past” speak to the fact that these are records of occurrences in the past. Yet, sometimes the past is in the future, “and remembering a memory from last summer the summer of 2970.” The past is sometimes remembered subconsciously, “who doesn’t remember it, she just goes on living/ with that date in her brain.” The past is a state that the dad carries, “looking into the past/ at the many mes.” 

The poems aren’t necessarily records but still aim to be are the ones that shine in the book. “The Year of Magical Fucking” in Dead Dad is about a lover that changed throughout the years to a right-wing supporter who believes only “love between a man and a woman can be pure love” when the voice in the poem remembers a year in which their love was strong and pure. She doesn’t see the lover’s new identity as a betrayal, but focuses instead on that beautiful “year of magical fucking.” 

Verdicts addresses decisions handed down by the Russian courts from 2010-2017. Again it is important to look at what occurred in the eye. Often repetition leads to an important highlighting of events. We feel the rhythm of the repetition in our bodies so much that we want to stop that event from taking place. Especially in Verdicts, “the vagina is not a vital organ” and “the death of the victim” are repeated over and over in the same poem.

There is a shyness with which she brings up her sexual orientation: “and also I realized I was a lesbian” when she calls The Center for Gender Problems, with its ironic title, seeking community, but the poem’s placement in the collection is anything but shy. Throughout the book, she advocates for gay, lesbian, and transgender people. The book itself creates a sense of community. Even the act of just stepping into the Center, which represents community, brings the voice in the poem happiness “but I was smiling at her I was beaming.” 

The poems are a record of violence, but there is a bright line that shines through to happiness that is found in community. The interweaving of these opposite emotions is what makes the poems strong. They are records of lives lived and lives interrupted. They are histories that beg not to be repeated. They are scars that reveal the past but also beg to be avoided in the future.

Reviewed by Olena Jennings