The Contour of the Body

The experience of time is to be unequal to oneself at each stage, to go beyond previously delineated limits, to grow to the enormity and incomprehensibility of life. The contour of the body shifts into the contour of the house,... and then into the contour of the world. They are changeable and elusive in their constancy; they give hope even when they collapse. They are the map of your destiny. "The Contour of the Body" is a poetic exploration of the boundaries between life and death, love and violence, loneliness and closeness, family and orphanhood, attachment and freedom, the integrity of the world and its disintegration. This book is my proof of the boundlessness of love. — Tatyana Stoyanova The Contour of the Body is the second book by Tatyana Stoyanova, a poet, curator of literary projects, and laureate and finalist of poetry competitions and awards. In drawings, visible and invisible contours are depicted through which the visible and invisible outlines of a given object are conveyed. The lines of the invisible contour are dashed, while the visible ones are solid. In Tatyana Stoyanova's verses, which sketch the contours of the body, home, and world, there are both. The body is woven from the strength of nature and life, and yet it is sacrificial. The home is woven from childhood, tenderness, memory, or rather, the soul?. The world is, on one hand, washed with love; on the other, along with the soul and body, it experiences irreparable loss, loses its children, shatters, and its contours change before our eyes. Pain sketches the visible contours, while the place of hope is a dashed line. However, according to the apostle Paul, "the visible is temporary, but the invisible is eternal." — Alla Gorbunova, poet, writer Tatyana Stoyanova was born in Chișinău. Until the age of 17, she lived in southern Moldova, in Gagauzia. In 2008, she moved to Moscow. Since 2015, she has been promoting contemporary Russian literature at the publishing house Redaction of Elena Shubina. She translates poetry from Romanian, Gagauz, and other languages. She is a participant in the poetry seminar of Dmitry Vodennikov at the Writing on the Roof school. Author of the poetry collection Matryoshka 2019. Published in the literary magazines Youth, Traditions & Aavangard, Formaslov.