Rana [Wound]

A young poetess carries her mother's ashes from the Volgograd region to Siberia to be buried at home next to her grandmother and aunt. From Volgograd to Moscow, from Moscow to Novosibirsk and Irkutsk by plane and then fourteen hours by bus through the taiga to the small dead-end town of Ust-Ilimsk. Carefully documenting the ritual of parting, complicated by bureaucratic red tape, the heroine makes her way to the comprehension of sexuality, femininity and death, as well as a new way of describing this experience. Oksana Vasiakina is a poetess, writer, essayist, laureate of the first degree of the Lyceum Prize (2019).