Featured image: Joseph Cornell, Untitled (Lily Losch) c.1935-38
Steve Finbow reviews Jana Astanov’s AvantGarden
AvantGarden, Jana Astanov, published by Speedball Books, 2026
Jana Astanov’s AvantGarden is a regenerative / degenerative chamber where language performs cellular transdifferentiation. In times of danger, Turritopsis dohrnii, a tiny Medusozoan jellyfish, reverts cells to earlier states of being in order to achieve invertebrate immortality. Astanov’s poems also employ a biological recursion but the ocean here is a linguistic one. Botanical nouns, PraSlavic myths, eroticism, and the digital world play at phenotype switching in order to refuse a human, all too human terminal entropy. Words liquefy, flesh dissolves, psychedelic spines unfurl microdoses of all the poems ever written. As we read, a root-logic moves like moles hunting earthworms beneath the word-mulched page.
Astanov’s poems fold eco‑mythology into contemporary vernacular, generating continuous metamorphoses – human, plant, and planetary matter slide and elide across each other, forming mutable ecosystems of logo-somatic desire and ritual. The vessel speaks – the tongue is duplicitous and heroic as a muscle of sex and language – and the verse moves through erotic shudders, astral debris, and heliostatic games, an orgy of organics and orgone energy convulsing into poetry.
Each poem is a cellular chamber – like a Joseph Cornell object box – myth, sex, flora, and metaphysics recombining into new verse morphologies. A Williamsburg shower, flower‑tongues, and river‑womb imagery create zones where writing becomes a metagenerative act. AvantGarden creates altered states moving with an intrinsic logic which refuses final form. The poems move through morphemic reconfiguration and the related shifting treacheries of memory – they generate futures, pasts, and presents by adapting their own cellular wordbeing.
About Jana Astanov:
Jana Astanov is a poet, interdisciplinary artist, and founder of CREATRIX Magazine, Red Temple Press and Speedball Books. Born in the Masuria (Mazury) Lake District of Poland and based in the United States, her writing explores myth, ecology, eros, ritual, and the living intelligence of language, where botanical, celestial, and human worlds continually transform into one another.
She is the author of six poetry collections: AvantGarden, Antidivine, Northern Grimoire, Sublunar, The Pillow Book of Burg, and Birds of Equinox.
About Steve Finbow:
Steve Finbow’s In Extremis: the A to Z of Francis Bacon will be published by Infinity Land Press in July 2026. A novella – The House of Contagion – will follow in late summer. And the second in his cultural history of illness trilogy – The Disorder Diaries: Neurological Conditions in the Arts – will be available later in the year.
